The sonnet in England, & other essays

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by

J893

T0

EDWARD

Professor of English Literature at the University of Dublin.

MY DEAR DOWDEN,

During sixteen years of a close and warm
friendship — made sacred by two great sorrows, in
which we have grieved together— you have put me
so largely in your debt by all kinds of cheer, encour-
agement, and aid, that I have acquired some of the
recklessness of the bankrupt debtor; and I am bold
enough to beg from you one thing more— your accept-
ance of the dedication of this little book. I have not
asked your consent to such a conjunction of your
name and my work; because, had such a petition been
made and granted, you might have incurred a certain
shadowy responsibility for the faults which, I am
sure, are to be found in these essays ; and, though
your affection might have made you somewhat in-
different to such responsibility, it would ill have
become me to burden you with it. As it is, I can
do you no injustice and I can give myself a great
pleasure by writing and printing words which imply
no more than this— that long ago you gave me the
right to sign myself— Your friend,

JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE.

263437

CONTENTS

PREFACE, ix

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND, i

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE, ... 64

LEIGH HUNT: THE MAN AND THE WRITER, 93

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE, . .134

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET, . . .158

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW, . . 182

PREFACE

THE greater part of the contents of this
volume has previously been printed. The
first essay appeared in the Contemporary
Review, the second in Fraser's Magazine, the
third in the London Quarterly Review, the
fourth in Macmillan's Magazine, and the
papers on Robert Stephen Hawker and Mr
Robert Buchanan are expansions of articles
contributed to a work which, my own share
in it being very unimportant, I may praise
without indelicacy, — that delightful anthology
The Poets and the Poetry of the Century,
edited so admirably by Mr Alfred H. Miles.
To those editors by whose kind permission
the six essays are reproduced here, my thanks
are heartily rendered, and I cannot feel less
grateful to my friendly publishers, who have
commended my work to all lovers of books by
the pains which they have taken to render it

x PREFACE

externally attractive. The reprinted matter
has been carefully revised, but I have thought
it best to leave unaltered those passages which
indicate the date of their production. In the
opening essay, for example, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti is spoken of as a living poet ; and I
retain the reference, not only for the reason
given, but because it is a joy to me to know
that Rossetti himself received pleasure from the
words of one who was then an entirely unknown
critic.

JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE.

November 26tJtt 1892.

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND
(1880)

MANY students of literature have watched with
interest the attempts which have been recently
made by some of our younger poets to naturalise
in England certain archaic forms of verse which
were at one time popular in France, and which
have of late years been revived in that country
by some of the members of the neo-Romantic
school. So far the attempt cannot be said to
have met with much success. We have had
a few rondels, rondeaux, triolets, villanelles,
ballades, and the like, often deftly constructed,
and sometimes exhibiting a grace so exquisite
that it is on the point of passing into absolute
beauty ; but, after all, our English poets do not
seem to move freely in these Gallican fetters, and
English readers, as a body, have treated the
revival with an indifference which does not

A

2 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

promise well for its longevity. Why this is so
cannot be decided hastily ; but it may be con-
sidered certain that the frigid reception of the
revived forms cannot be attributed either wholly
or in large measure to their arbitrary character;
for the sonnet, which is as arbitrary as the
rondel, and which was, when first imported from
Italy, quite as unfamiliar, has become completely
naturalised among us, and has been chosen by so
many English poets as a favourite form of
expression that we have come to look upon it
as little more artificial than the so-called heroic
verse — the iambic pentameter — which we are
accustomed to consider such a typical English
vehicle. The history of the sonnet in England
' would be an interesting subject for a small
volume, but as yet no adequate or exhaustive
survey of the wide and full-eared field has been
attempted ; for the contributions made to sonnet
literature by Leigh Hunt, Mr John Dennis,
Archbishop Trench, and others, have been
confessedly partial and desultory, and in the
face of many contributions to poetical criticism
which have of late been among the precious
gifts of the years, we hope that one of the boons
which the near future may have in store for us
will be some work written especially for those

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 3

who have taken to heart Wordsworth's exhorta-
tion, 'Scorn not the sonnet.'

The task of the writer of such a book has
of late been much facilitated by the labours
of Mr David M. Main, whose Treasury of
English Sonnets brings, for the first time
within the boards of a single volume, a really
satisfying collection of as much of our sonnet
work as can be considered really representa-
tive. The Treasury opens with two sonnets
from Sir Thomas Wyat, to whom we owe
the acclimatisation of the Italian exotic which
has taken so kindly to our insular soil and
air, and closes with that sonnet of terrible
beauty, instinct with sombre splendour, which
Oliver Madox Brown, a boy even more marvel- '
lous than Chatterton, prefixed to his weird pas-
sionate romance of The Black Swan. Between
these, we need hardly say, are to be found
infinite riches in a little room. Here are the
dainty measures of Sir Philip Sidney ; the /
crystals which reflect the clear though cold light
of Spenser's passion ; the cunningly wrought
caskets, rich with varied imagery, in which
Shakspeare locked his soul's secret ; the grave
and majestic harmonies of Milton, that 'God-
gifted organ voice of England;' the solemn

4 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

thoughted, passionately contemplative records of
Wordsworth's retirement to * the sonnet's scanty
plot of ground'; the painted windows of 'warm
gules/ rose-bloom, and 'soft amethyst' through
which the spirit of Keats throws a coloured
radiance ; and, most dear and memorable of all
those nightingale melodies, those resonant heart-
throbs wrought into a divine music, those ec-
stasies of love and grief and high aspiration,
which have been left as an immortal legacy by
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

There are two questions which at once put
themselves to any writer upon the subject of the
sonnet. First comes the query, What is a
sonnet ? then the further question, What are
' the qualities in virtue of which a sonnet takes
rank and precedence ? In England it was only
for a short time that the first question was an
easy one to answer. Into the history of the
various forms of the Italian sonnet it is not
necessary to travel, for we have only to do with
j that one form which, after many struggles, had
become universally recognised as the most per-
fect. To a true student of sonnet development
the notion that a sonnet might be advantageously
written in four ordinary elegiac quatrains and a
couplet, or in seven couplets, or with any other

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 5

arrangement of the rhymes than the two or
three which had become established by repeated
experiments, would not sound one whit more
absurd than the theory that a sonnet might be
written in thirteen, or in fifteen, or in any other
number of lines ; for if, in a purely arbitrary
form the canons of composition sanctioned by an
established nomenclature may be violated in one
particular, they may be violated in all, and
when this violation is accomplished, where is
the sonnet ? Our present loose English theory
1 in favour of a relaxation .... of nearly
every law in the Italian code, except the two
cardinal ones which demand that the sonnet
shall consist of fourteen rhymed decasyllabic
verses, and be a development of one idea, mood,
feeling, or sentiment,' has the adhesion of Mr
, Main, from whose Preface I quote ; but it is
I clear that it has been formulated to fit the facts,
for it would naturally be unpleasant to adhere
. to a canon which would exclude all the sonnets
of Shakspeare and a considerable number of
very beautiful specimens by later poets. The
superiority of the true Italian to the Shak-
spearian or any other sonnet form in unity,
weight, and harmony, will be doubted by hardly
any competent critic ; indeed, with the solitary

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

exception of Ebenezer Elliot, it has not, so far
as my knowledge goes, been explicitly ques-
tioned by any well-known poet ; and Elliot,
though he had the genuine afflatus, is hardly
an authority on a subtle delicacy of art tech-
nique. The Italian sonnet is unquestionably a
difficult form of verse, and it seems probable
that the early English sonneteers were repelled
by the difficulties, and ignorant of the splendid
successes that might be achieved were those
difficulties overcome. Sir Thomas Wyat's
attempts were certainly not calculated to inspire
a fervent faith in the possibilities of the new
vehicle, and even his fellow-worker, the Earl of
Surrey, was quick to find, or to think that he
had found, a form more harmonious with
the genius of the English language. ' Leigh
Hunt,' says Mr Main, ' has pointed out that
Spenser, with all his Italian proclivities, was the
first who deliberately abandoned the archetypal
form of the sonnet/ but, unless we lay special
stress upon the word * deliberately,' even this
sentence does not throw the appearance of the
irregular English sonnet far enough back.
Whether deliberately or not it is impossible to
say, but the Italian code was violated by the
Earl of Surrey, who died five years before the

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 7

received date of Spenser's birth, and whose
Songs and Sonnets were published in 1557,
while Spenser's adoption of the form which
Surrey had originated dates from the year 1591.
The definition of a sonnet which commended
itself to the author of the Faery Queen was
indeed more elastic than that which has been
adopted by Mr Main, for at one period he did
not even consider rhyme essential, and his
earliest poems published under the name of
sonnets are accordingly written in blank verse.
Finally, he hit upon a novelty in the shape of a
sonnet in which the three quatrains are linked
together by one common rhyme, and with this
form he appeared to be satisfied, as he adopted
it in the Amoretti, which is undoubtedly his
most ambitious series of sonnets. It seems
absurd to speak of the sonnet as an established
and definable species of verse if we admit the
legitimacy of variations like these ; for such an
admission leaves nothing of the sonnet but its
limitation to fourteen decasyllabic lines, and
even this remaining test is rendered meaningless
by a neglect of the companion tests, which alone
confer upon it validity, and indeed constitute
its sole reason of being. The only way to untie
a Gordian knot, which must otherwise be reck-

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

lessly cut, is to allow the name of sonnet
to be given without qualification only to those
constructed on the Italian model; other four-
teen-line poems being set apart by a distin-
guishing prefix, such as illegitimate, irregular,
or Shakspearian.

The second question, concerning the qualities
which give to a sonnet its special value, is one
which any thoughtful writer, aware of the
differences of opinion which have prevailed
among eminent critics, will answer with modesty
and hesitation. As one illustration of a curious
divergence of taste and feeling, I have noticed
lately that while one writer of fine critical genius
declares that ' a true sonnet should rise into a
climax in the last two lines, should kindle into
flame as it expires,' another deservedly hon-
oured authority numbers among the conspicu-
ous beauties of Wordsworth's sonnets the fact
that ' there is hardly one . , . which ends in a
point. At the close of the sonnet, where the
adventitious effect of the point might be apt to
outshine the intrinsic value of the subject, it
seems to have been studiously avoided. Mr
Wordsworth's sonnet never goes off, as it were,
:with a clap or repercussion at the close, but is
thrown off like a rocket, breaks into light, and

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 9

falls in a soft shower of brightness.' That such a
difference upon a mere matter of sonnet composi-
tion should be possible, seems an indication that
the sonnet has never received the amount of
study which it deserves, and we are prepared to
find that, with regard to the essential qualities of
this verse-form, opinions are still more divided
and equally irreconcilable. As a matter of fact
this is really the case. Frequently, in Mr Main's
notes, we encounter verdicts of well-known critics,
assigning to certain sonnets or groups of sonnets
a supremacy the notes of which are anything
but easy to discover ; and we are driven to the
conclusion that a great deal of sonnet criticism
resembles the criticism of artistically uneducated
visitors to picture galleries, who, after confessing
that they are quite ignorant of painting, and
only know what they like, do not hesitate to
commit themselves to the most uncompromising
and unguarded estimates. Without doubt the
first fact to be remembered in formulating
canons of sonnet criticism is that a sonnet is a *"
poem, and that, whatsoever it lacks, it must at
any rate possess the qualities without which no
poem can be admirable. The presentation of
the motive, whether intellectual or emotional^
must be adequate ; its treatment must be iiri-

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

aginative ; and the language in which it is
embodied must be entirely transparent and
musical — chosen with such unerring instinct as
to leave the impression that there can have been
no choice, that every word has an inevitableness
which forbids the supposition that any other
might have taken its place. But a good sonnet
must be something more than fourteen lines of
good poetry: it must fulfil its peculiar conditions
of being, both structural and vital. Of the
former we have already spoken ; the latter it is
a more difficult task to specify without falling
into commonplace, or drifting into what bears
the semblance of dogmatism. ( The one thing
most needful in the sonnet is what may be called
impressive unity. I do not, with Mr Main,
think it absolutely essential that it should be an
utterance of one thought or one emotion, for
within its bounds one. thought maybe opposed
by another, and one emotion set against its
opposite ; but it is essential that the impression
left by the sonnet as a whole shall be thoroughly
homogeneous — that as it approaches its close the
varying threads, if there have been such, should
be twined together, and that the reader should
be made to feel that the whole commends, amal-
gamates, and glorifies all the parts— that every

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 1 1

part is, indeed, but a member of a vital organism.
Take as an illustration a sonnet of Wordsworth's
unequalled among his many sonnets for tender
beauty; though surpassed by a few in insistent
power and mastering splendour : —

'It is a beauteous evening, calm and free ;
The holy time is quiet as a nun
Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillit)? ; ^
The gentleness of heaven is on the sea : <*-
Listen ! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make £
A sound like thunder — everlastingly. -
Dear child, dear girl ! that walketh with me here,^S
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought, .
Thy nature is not therefore less divine : fy-
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year,
And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.'

Now, there can be no doubt that this sonnet
has that impressive unity which, as has been
said, the form pre-eminently demands ; but it is
the unity which comes not of the expression of
one mood, but of the discovery of a spiritual
ground common to two moods which seem
diverse and, at first sight, even inconsistent
— the emotion iroused in the mind of the philo-
sophical poet by the beating against his heart
of the great heart of Nature, and the apparent

12 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

apathy of the young girl who steps beside
him seemingly untouched by solemn thought.
True, at the beginning of the sestet the con-
tinuity of thought appears to be broken, but
we are only led off along a returning curve,
and when we reach the close we compass for
the first time the outline of the inspiring
conception which informs every line of this
perfect poem.

This sonnet cannot fail to remind us of the
question to which two opposing answers have
been quoted, as to whether in this form of
composition it is or is not desirable that we
should be led on to a point or climax. Most
readers, whether critical or uncritical, will agree
with the first of the two verdicts — that the
sonnet, like the plant which blooms in our
gardens, should vindicate its right to be by the
bright consummate flower which comes as the
fulfilment of its promise, the culmination of its
life. It is impossible, however, to lay down
rules as to whether it is better that the wave of
poetic emotion should gently lap or tempestu-
ously break upon its shore ; whether the sound
left lingering in our ears by high poetry should
be a shrill trumpet-blast or a dying fall of harp-
like melody ; for the winds of the spirit blow as

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 13

they list, and Art, like Wisdom, is justified of
her children. Still, one thing at least may be
said without pedantic dogmatism — that the
sonnet should, as it proceeds, gain strength and
momentum instead of losing them ; that its
latest lines should, in sense, in sound, or in
both, reach a nobler altitude than its earlier
ones ; and that it should leave with us a sense
of victorious accomplishment, not of vague dis-
satisfaction. This may sometimes be achieved
without anything that can with truth be called
a climax : it is so achieved in Milton's great
sonnet On the late Massacres in Piedmont ; but *
even there the poet's instinct compels him to
conclude with a line so weighty |and sonorous
that it reminds us of an avalanche thundering
down the side of one of his * Alpine mountains
cold.' Exaggerated straining after point and
climax is bad, but so is similar straining after
any kind of artistic effect ; and if Wordsworth
did, as his critic says he did, studiously avoid to
avail himself of one of the most legitimate
means of stamping on a reader's mind a sharp
and permanent impression of the thought or
mood he was moved to utter, he was guilty of
an offence equally reprehensible ; he was a
Philistine binding only too effectually the

14 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

Samson of song in the green withs of scholastic
theory.

The division of the sonnet into two unequal
parts, a division which our best sonnet-writers
have shown an increasing disposition to main-
tain, is, in itself, an indication of the true mode
of treatment. The first eight lines, technically
the octave, seem as if they might be intended
for a broad exposition of the motive ; the last
six, the sestet, for a special application of it.
Here is a sonnet of Mr Matthew Arnold's
exemplifying this method of handling : —

WORLDLY PLACE

' Even in a palace, life may be led well ! ''
So spoke the imperial sage, purest of men,
Marcus Aurelius. — But the stifling den
Of common life, where, crowded up pell-mell,
Our freedom for a little bread we sell,
And drudge under some foolish master's ken,
Who rates us if we peer outside our pen —
Matched with a palace, is not this a hell ? l
y Even in a palace ! On his truth sincere a

Who spake these words, no shadow ever came ; t)-
And when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame Q»
Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win, -
I'll stop and^say : " There were no succour here !Q
The aids to noble life are all within." ' r-

In this sonnet a general statement of great
ethical facts of life is followed by a personal

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 15

appropriation which brings them home. In
another, by the same poet, the process is
reversed ; it begins with the individual instance
and passes from it to the universal lesson. The
thought is a fine one, and the treatment
singularly beautiful and satisfying.

EAST LONDON

' 'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his window seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice disspirited ;
I met a preacher there I knew, and said :
" 111 and o'er-worked, how fare you in this scene ? "
" Bravely ! " said he, " for I of late have been
Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread"
O human soul ! so long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,
To cheer thee and to right thee if thou roam,
Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night !
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.'

In numerous instances, however, even where
the formal division is retained, there is no such
perceptible break or turn as in any of the
sonnets I have quoted. The theme of the
octave may be prolonged through the sestet, but
there will be a subtle difference of treatment.
It will be carried on in a slightly changed key, or
in slower or quicker time ; and in most sonnets

1 6 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

of the highest class the sestet will probably be
either a completion, concentration, or gathering
together of the subject matter of the octave, or a
return upon it for some new and untried point
of approach, thus giving to a familiar thought or
fancy the magnetic charm of which we thought
accustomed wont and use had for ever deprived
it. Nor is it probable that there will ever be a
total failure of writers who will treat the sonnet
as a simple unity, the two parts melting into one
another and ceasing to be separately distinguish-
able, as they do in the supreme achievement of
Milton, and in some of the most perfect and
unapproachable efforts of Mrs Browning and Mr
Rossetti, such as Substitution and the sonnet For
a Venetian Pastoral. For evermore in matters
like these the mighty masters will be a law unto
themselves, and the validity of their legislation
will be attested and held against all comers by
the splendour of an unchallengeable success.

Perhaps all has been said that needs to be said
concerning the peculiar qualities of the sonnet ;
for, as I have said, many of its requirements are
only what would be the requirements of any
brief poem charged with the adequate treatment
of a single theme. Cjt must have an imaginative \
completeness which leaves us serenely satisfied ; I

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

it must have an artistic perfectness which shall
stand the test of that frequent and loving exam-
ination to which, in virtue of its very brevity, it
makes a claim ; it must have its every line
strong, its every word harmonious : it must be
concentrated yet clear, compact yet fluent ; and
while every phrase and image is in itself a joy-
giving thing of beauty, every member must
remain in sweet subordination to the total effect
and impression of the wholeT)

One might almost assume without examina-
tion that even among the thousands of English
sonnets there would be found comparatively few
which fulfil all the conditions of so elaborate
and exigent a form of verse. The text of Mr
Main's Treasury contains 463 sonnets, chosen with
true discrimination, and representing the highest
achievement of every English sonneteer who had
passed away before the close of the year 1879;
but it would not be maintained by any critic, or
even by the compiler himself, that more than a
very small proportion of these can be classed
among the flawless pearls of poetry. It may be
doubted whether there are more than fifty of
them which, if judged as sonnets, and not merely
as fourteen-line poems, can be praised without
implicit limitations and reserves. No amiable

B

1 8 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

person will be inclined to think harshly of
editorial enthusiasm, or to blame severely the
critic who believes he has rescued from oblivion
the work of an undeservedly neglected genius ;
but, as a rule, ultimate fame is fairly propor-
tioned to desert, and if a writer has been
forgotten, the presumption is, that whatever be
the merits or beauties of his work, its loss of
hold upon the memory of mankind is but one
example of the operation of the law of the
survival of the fittest. ^Sir Thomas Wyat's
sonnets were of the true Italian type, and oc-
casionally, as in the sonnet —

'Divers doth use, as I have heard and know,'

he attains that charm, a compound of ingenuity
and grace, in which few cultured writers of his
day were deficient. But this is all ; there is a
total lack of positive virtue, of quality, of dis-
tinction ; nor in passing from his work to that
of his compeer, the Earl of Surrey, do we make
any change for the better, but remain in the
/ same atmosphere of respectable commonplace.
Indeed, among the courtly versifiers of the
period — the mob of gentlemen who wrote with
dignity rather than with ease — we only find one,
Sir Philip Sidney, whose sonnet work rises

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 1 9

above this dead level, and though Charles Lamb
can hardly be acquitted of loving exaggeration
when he says that the best of Sidney's sonnets
' are among the best of their sort,' they are cer-
tainly a refreshing oasis in a desert where
nothing grew but sterile flowers of strained
sentiment, fantastic phrase, and far-fetched »
imagery. Not that Sidney is free from the
conceits of his age ; his verse is, as Lamb says,
* stuck full of amorous fancies/ which the genial
essayist celebrates affectionately on the ground
that ( True Love thinks no labour to send out
thoughts upon the vast and more than Indian
voyages, to bring home rich pearls, outlandish
wealth, gems, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice in self-
depreciating similitudes as shadows of true
amiabilities in the Beloved/ Sidney's conceits,
however, are humanised ; they glow instead of
merely sparkling, and we do not simply see the
versifier in them, but feel the gentle, tender,
chivalrous humanity behind them. Now and
then he abandons them altogether, and his
thought and language acquire the sweet natural-
ness and spontaneity which were the dower of
both an earlier and a later age, but which in his
time were for the court poets lost gifts, as in the
following sonnet, which it seems strange should

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

not have found a place among the other jewels
embedded in the setting of Elia's golden eulogy.
Perhaps it looked too much like an English
pebble to consort well with the spoils of those
' more than Indian voyages/

' Because I breathe not love to every one,
Nor do not use set colours for to wear,
Nor nourish special locks of vowed hair,
Nor give each speech the full point of a groan,
The courtly nymphs, acquainted with the moan
Of them who in their lips Love's standard bear, —
" What he ! " say they of me ; " now I dare swear
He cannot love. No, no, let him alone."
And think so still, if Stella know my mind !
Profess indeed I do not Cupid's art ;
But you, fair maids, at length this true shall find
That this right badge is but worn in the heart :
Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove :
They love indeed who quake to say they love.'

Another reason for the exclusion of this
sonnet from Lamb's selected twelve may be
found in its occasional lapses from perfect expres-
sional grace, several of the lines being, to say
the least, susceptible of improvement either in
transparency or music ; but if we are to deal
severely with fine points like these, there are
few sonnets of the period that can escape a
whipping, and, the last line betrays a pene.
tration into the true mysteries of love which,

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 21

if more general among Sidney's contemporaries,
would have slain before birth many of their
'vain amatorious poems/ which confer honour
upon love, and add value to literature in an
equally infinitesimal degree. Still, it must be
admitted that the sonnet quoted is in workman-
ship inferior to at least three of Lamb's twelve —
notably to that exquisitely beautiful invocation
to Sleep, the felicity and gracCj of which might
win the suffrages of many a harsher critic than
the gentle Elia.

Spenser is one of our greatest poets, but he
is far from being a great sonneteer, and of his
sonnet-like poems Mr Main utters the opinion
of most readers when he calls them disap-
pointing. They are deficient in body, frigid
in tone, and altogether wanting in the graces of
manner we might naturally expect from the
author of the Faery Queen. Among them all
there is only one which leaves on the mind any
sharp impression, and that one has certainly a
dignified movement and tender chastity of diction
which make it worthy of its high parentage. We
may not all admit the perfect appropriateness
of Lord Macaulay's characterisation of Milton's
' Avenge, O Lord ' as ' a collect in verse,' but
this sonnet of Spenser's has really a very ap-

22 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

preciable affinity to the style of the collects —
those unique jewels of devout aspiration.

' Most glorious Lord of Life ! that on this day
Did'st make thy triumph over death and sin,
And having harrowed hell did'st bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win :
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin ;
And grant that we, for whom Thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood washed clean from sin
May live for ever in felicity !
And that thy love we weighing worthily
May likewise love Thee for the same again;
And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
With love may one another entertain.
So let us love, dear love, like as we ought :
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.'

As a poet in the broadest sense of the word,
Drummond of Hawthornden ranks far below
Spenser ; but in the ' sonnet's scanty plot f he
rules as of right divine, and even the lord of
the world of faery must stand uncovered before
J him. There is not the same weight of matter
in his sonnets that there is in the irregular
sonnets of Shakspeare, nor is there the same
penetrative vigour of language ; but there are
qualities equally precious if not equally impres-
sive— exquisite keenness of sensibility, attested
by peculiar delicacy of touch ; imaginative
vision and notable power of rendering it ; native

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 23

spontaneousness happily allied with fine mastery
of the secrets of metre and melody ; and the
rare art — carried to perfection in the sonnets of
Mr Rossetti — of making his verse the expression,
not of crude passion, which, as Edgar Poe
pointed out, is not genuine poetic material,
but rather the reflection of passion in the still
deeps of imaginative reverie. In Drummond's
sonnet work, we certainly miss one characteristic
which is almost a constant note of high genius,
the magnificent recklessness which takes no
thought of finite limitations, but boldly essays
the impossible. He knew what he could do and
what he could not do, and the outcome of this
knowledge is a pervading equality of craftsman-
ship. Though almost all his sonnets are
beautiful, there is not one of such overmastering
beauty that it storms the citadel of the soul and
takes the memory captive. We feel, and cannot
help feeling, that when Drummond had ex-
hausted his expressional possibilities, he had
still a store of the raw material of poetry which
remained unworked and unworkable, and he
therefore remains for ever what Dr George
MacDonald, with fine insight, calls him — l a voix
voilee, or veiled voice of song.'

In a brief study it were vain to attempt

24 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

speech of the minor singers of that vocal age: of
Sir Walter Raleigh, George Chapman, Robert
Greene, Michael Dray ton, John Donne, William
Browne, and other less known poets ; and if the
truth must be told, there is — despite the
rhapsodising eulogies of a few critics — little in
their contributions to sonnet literature to repay
the study of anyone but an editor or a specialist.
Indeed some of the verdicts passed upon their
performances even by men of real eminence,
seem of use only as proofs of the dulling effect
upon the finer sensibilities of long poring over
essentially second-rate work. No one who has
any feeling for the truly poetic in poetry can
refrain from a sardonic smile when he finds one
of these critics speaking of a far-fetched, extrava-
gant, and utterly unimpressive conceit of Sir
Walter Raleigh's, entitled A Vision upon the
Faery Quecne, as 'alone sufficient to place
Raleigh in the rank of those few original writers
who can introduce and perpetuate a new type in
a literature.' If the false and frigid rhetoric of
this Vision be the note of the new type, we
certainly prefer the old ; but the very badness of
this sonnet seems to have fascinated its critics
and made them feel that it stood in all the more
need of praise. Even Mr Main, who is as a

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 25

rule singularly free from extravagance, actually
quotes, apparently with approval, the remark of
Dr Hannah that it has received the tribute of
the imitation of Milton in his sonnet on his
deceased wife. Both poems certainly begin with
the word * Methought,' and both mention a tomb
— 'there is a river in Macedon and there is a river
in Monmouth'; — but that is absolutely all, and
this being so, it is hardly likely that Milton's
* tribute ' can add much to Raleigh's fame.

We have said that the sonnet writers of the
Shakspearian age have left little really memor-
able work, but that little may fairly claim a
recognition of its virtues. The one grain of
wheat in the bushel of chaff is wheat still, and in
this chaff-heap there are more grains than one,
though they undoubtedly need some seeking for.
One of them is an irregular sonnet of Michael
Drayton's, to which Mr Henry Reed in his
' Lectures on the English Poets ' does no more
than justice when he says, 'From Anacreon
down to Moore I know no lines on the old
subject of lovers' quarrels distinguished for equal
tenderness of sentiment'; though when he adds
' and richness of fancy,' we confess that we are
not able to follow him. The octave is, as will
be seen, entirely unadorned, and the single

26 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

metaphor in the sestet is a little marred by the
double personification of Love and Passion, which
is rather confusing, and which might easily have
been avoided. Of fancy, however, we have
enough and to spare in the poetry of that period ;
the charm of this sonnet lies in its perfect
simplicity, in its singular directness, in its
unforced pathos, in that adequacy of treatment
which makes us feel that what had to be said is
said in the best possible way.

c Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part —
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me ;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free ;
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death
And Innocence is closing up his eyes—
Now if thou would'st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.5

Another of the wheat-grains is a true sonnet
by John Donne on that one subject which, with
the single exception of Love, has been the most
favoured motive of lyrical poets, and which for
the singers of our own dreamful day, seems

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 2 7

possessed of a peculiar fascination. It is to be
doubted whether the English language has any
invocation to Death which, for manliness,
weight, and dignity, deserves a place beside this
high utterance of the first of our miscalled
' metaphysical poets.'

' Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor death ; nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure : then from thee much more must flow
And soonest our best men with thee do go —
Rest of their bones, and souls' delivery.
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell ;
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then ?
One short sleep past we wake eternally
And Death shall be no more : Death, thou shalt die.'

I know of nothing of the same kind in
English poetry more impressive than this
solemnly triumphant close; and the only parallel
which occurs at the moment is the magnificent
conclusion of Mr Swinburne's perfect lyric, A
Forsaken Garden.

•* Here now in his triumph where all things falter,
Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,
As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead.'

28 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

The remarkable, and in many respects pre-
eminent, series of fourteen-line poems known as
the sonnets of Shakspeare, present a dilemma on
one horn of which the writer of a short essay
must be impaled. They fill such a space and
hold such a rank in the sonnet literature of
England, that to ignore them is impossible, and
to treat them adequately is not one whit less so.
Numberless volumes, the outcome of long and
loving study, have been devoted to a theme which
I must needs dismiss in a few brief and neces-
sarily unsatisfactory sentences. True, most of
these volumes have been occupied with matters
which are irrelevant to our main purpose.
Wordsworth, whose briefest criticisms are gene-
rally full of insight, surely erred when he said
that in these poems Shakspeare unlocked his
heart, for the precious collection is still, like the
book in the Apocalypse, ' sealed with seven
seals.' We know by whom the poems were
written, but we can hardly say without uncer-
tainty that we know to whom they were
addressed ; and with regard to their true signifi-
cance, speculation has followed speculation, and
theory has set itself against theory. Perhaps it
is impossible to repress the desire to penetrate
those occult mysteries of literature of which the

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 29

Shakspeare sonnet problem is among the most
fascinating; but it is certainly unfortunate that
perplexing questions concerning the genesis and
final cause of these poems should so largely have
diverted attention from those positive qualities
which give them their main value and interest.
The first of these qualities — or rather that
quality in which all others are included — is what
must be called, for want of another word, their
pervading Shakspearianism. We smile at the
4 Correggiosity of Correggio,' and we may smile
at the Shakspearianism of Shakspeare ; but,
after all, how can the bringer-in of a unique type
be defined in the terms of an established nomen-
clature'? Shakspeare has this and that quality
which belonged to his predecessors — the insight
of one, the imagination of another, the expres-
sional felicity of a third ; but he unites them all
in a new synthesis, and for the product of this
synthesis we are bound to make a new definition.
Until Shakspeare has a compeer he is a class by
himself, and as the world seems to have decided
that the compeer has not yet arrived, he remains
above all else Shakspearian. And in his poems,
notably in these so-called sonnets, which are the
richest and completest of them, this unique
personal note is as clearly discernible as in the

3° THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

noblest of the plays, and much more discernible
than in some of those earlier dramatic efforts
which mark the tentative stage of his develop-
ment. If we could imagine the existence of a
person of cultivated taste who was still ignorant
of the recognised place of Shakspeare in litera-
ture, he could not pass from the sonnet work
of Shakspeare's contemporaries to that of the
master himself without an instant sense of an
enlarged outlook, of a freer, clearer air, of a
more impressive spiritual presence. There is
the recognition of an unmistakable amplitude
of treatment, a large utterance, and ensuing
upon this a feeling of fellowship with a soul
wealthy enough to disdain the smaller economies
of the intellect. In these sonnets there is no
sense of strain ; we do not feel, as in reading
Drummond, that the poet has touched his
possibilities, but that even in his farthest reaches
they are still long ahead of him. Even when
the intellectual level attained by an author is
not absolutely high, as it is here, there is always
a felt charm in his work if it leave such an
impression as this ; a charm like that which
belongs to the feats of some trained athlete
who performs what seem muscular miracles with
the graceful ease of effortless strength.

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 31

Coleridge has spoken of the * condensation of
thought' in these sonnets, Dyce of their 'pro-
found thought,' Archbishop Trench of their
being 'double-shotted with thought'; but, if I
mistake not, the thing which gives to them
their specific gravity is not what is usually
understood by thought, but what may rather be
described as intellectualised emotion — that is./
the incarnation of pure emotion, (which is itself
too rare and attenuated an essence to be
adequately and at the same time sustainedly
expressed), in a body of symbol or situation
which is supplied by the intellect. The simple
poring out of passion is apt to become tiresome
to all save the lover and the beloved ; but in
reading Shakspeare's sonnets we are sensible of
no loss of gusto; the last is as piquant as the
first; and this because the mere passion, which
is in itself an ordinary thing, — though the
passion of a Titan must needs be Titanesque, —
is supplemented by the tremendous intellectual
force which lies behind and beneath it, and bears
it up as the foam-bell is borne on the bosom of
the great sea.

The connoisseur in these delicacies of verse
loses little by passing per saltum from Shak-
speare to Milton, whose sonnets as unmistakably

32 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

as his epics bear the impress of the modelling of
a Michael Angelo of literature. Dr Johnson
and Hannah More, after quietly assuming that
Milton's sonnets were very bad, set out upon an
investigation into the causes of their badness;
and it was in the course of this edifying and
fruitful inquiry that Johnson distinguished
himself by his description of Milton's genius as
one ( that could hew a Colossus out of a rock,
but could not carve heads on cherry-stones.'
This curious remark has often been quoted in
proof of Dr Johnson's absolute insensitiveness to
the appeal of essential poetry, and it does
undoubtedly prove this very conclusively ; but
it has not, we think, been noticed that it betrays
an equally absolute ignorance of the true char-
acter of the sonnet. Critics have been more
careful to maintain Milton's ability to carve
heads upon cherry-stones than to inquire
whether cherry-stone carving and sonnet writing
have any real artistic affinity. A head upon a
cherry-stone is- at. best an ingenious trifle, which
can but show the dexterity of its artificer ; a
sonnet js of the nature of a cameo, which is
either a satisfying work of art or nothing.
The pre-Miltonic sonnet had certainly been
largely devoted to the elaboration of amor-

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 33

ous fantasies : Milton, as Landor gracefully
said —

.X

' Caught the sonnet from the dainty hand
Of Love, who cried to lose it, and he gave s

The notes to glory ; — '

but thus to apotheosise any literary form is the
surest evidence of supreme mastery of its condi-
tions and possibilities. It would not be too
much to say that every sonnet from Milton's
hand betrays this mastery as fully as the
O of Giotto. They are unequal in concep-
tion ; some are the utterances of a more and
some of a less happy mood ; but ' the spirit of
the handling ' is the same in all. We perceive
everywhere the splendid sweep of a soul which
revolves through vast circumferences around a
fixed centre, with its centripetal and centrifugal
forces in impressive equipoise ; and the emotion
born and maintained within us is that which
would be roused by the swimming into our
ken of a new planet, moving through the
stellar spaces as through the halls of an
ancestral home.

Even when Milton's matter repels or fails to
interest, there is always something in his manner

which compels an attentive and fascinated hear-

o

34 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

ing. The personal quality, which was of pure
and high self-containedness all compact, informs
the language and gives it a magical power. He
on his mountain-top had learned from the silent
stars and voiceful winds a speech which was not
the dialect of the crowd, and, whatever be the
burden of the saying, there is a spell in the mere
intonation. We feel the spell sometimes almost
humorously, as in the rough-hewn sonnet with
its harsh, unpoetic, bald, monosyllabic rhymes —
'clogs,' 'dogs,' 'frogs,' 'hogs,' — which leaves
almost the same sense of weight and mass that
we derive from his nobler and more delightful
utterances. Among these, it is needless to say,
one stands apart in unapproached and unap-
proachable majesty. The great sonnet On the
late Massacres in Piedmont is one of those
achievements in which matter of the noblest
order moulds for itself a form of the highest
excellence, matter and form being, as in music
and in all supreme art, so bound up and inter-
fused that, though we know both of them to be
there, we cannot know them or think of them
apart. Much has been said in eulogy of this
sonnet, and said worthily and well ; but there is
a perfection which mocks praise, and it is this
perfection that is here attained ; not the perfec-

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 35

tion which consists in this quality or in that, but
which comes when all qualities which may be
displayed, all potentialities which can be exerted,
meet in triumphant, satisfying, utter accomplish-
ment. When Lord Macaulay called it a collect
in verse he was on the right track, for such
comparisons are more expressive and less mis-
leading than the more definite characterisations
of criticism ; but it would have been safer to
compare it to some great work of nature, or even
to some equally moving product of pictorial, or
plastic, or musical art, than to any other work
of literary craftsmanship, howsoever perfect. To
undervalue the collects would simply be to show
a total want of feeling for exquisiteness of form;
but the peculiar quality of their indwelling
virtue has a subtle but quite apprehensible
difference from the something which makes
Milton's sonnet just what it is. The collects
have grace, pliancy, symmetry, and compact-
ness; they have both stately phrase and tender
cadence, and they are impregnated with an
undying aroma of devotion ; but they have not,
and it would not be fitting that they should
have, the splendid and sonorous rhetoric, the
solemn majesty as of a judge pronouncing doom,
the white heat of prophetic passion, which give

36 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

its unique character to this invocation of divine
vengeance.

Of Milton's other sonnets, ' soul-animating
strains, alas too few,' nothing more need be said
here. In the great utterance of which we have
been discoursing all their varied virtues are
gathered up and concentrated. What is true of
it is true in less measure of its companions, and
they are worthy of grateful study, not merely
for their absolute perfections, but because they
are the first successful attempts to vindicate on a
large scale the possibilities of the true sonnet.
The mighty intellectual and ethical force of
which all Milton's work is the manifestation
cannot blind us to the supremacy of his purely
aesthetic instincts. Whatever else he might
remember, he never forgot that he was an artist,
and in several of these sonnets his art achieves
some of its finest triumphs. Even in those
which are, comparatively speaking, of minor
importance and interest, there is a restful ade-
quacy, a satisfying fulfilment, which all sonnet-
writers must necessarily strive after, but which
very few attain ; and, in addition to this inestim-
able quality of the sonnets as poetic wholes,
there is not one without some line or lines
which, for elevation of thought or magnificence

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 37

of music, impress us at once with an ever-
enduring sense of final mastery.

Between the age of Milton and the age of
Wordsworth the sonnet literature of England is
but a desert, with spots rather than patches of
poetic verdure. Even in Mr Main's Treasury,
which errs, if at all, on the side of undue
copiousness, the whole period is represented by
only twenty-one specimens, selected from thir-
teen poets, and of the best of these it can only
be said in the words of Dr Johnson that they
are 'not bad.' It is curious, however, to note
that in the fetters of an artificial form the
singers of an essentially artificial age lose much
of their artificiality, and though we do not
altogether escape from conventional epithets
and hackneyed allusions, we find a grateful
freshness and freedom which are missing in
most of the poetry of the time. Perhaps one
of the most interesting, though one of the least
familiar of these growths of an ungenial soil, is
the work of one who gained distinction by his
prose rather than his verse. William Roscoe,
the biographer of Lorenzo de* Medici, having
met with business misfortunes, found himself
compelled to bring his property to the hammer.
Even his beloved books had to go, and from

38 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

these he could not part without a heart-
pang, which found expression in this touching
sonnet : —

1 As one who, destined from his friends to part,
Regrets his loss, yet hopes again erewhile
To share their converse and enjoy their smile,
And tempers as he may affliction's dart —
Thus, loved associates ! chiefs of elder Art !
Teachers of Wisdom ! who could once beguile
My tedious hours, and lighten every toil,
I now resign you ; nor with fainting heart ;
For pass a few short years, or days, or hours,
And happier seasons may their dawn unfold,
And all your sacred fellowship restore ;
When, freed from earth, unlimited its powers,
Mind shall with mind direct communion hold,
And kindred spirits meet to part no more.'

One or two of Cowper's sonnets, particularly
that addressed to Mrs Unwin, which begins with
the line —

• Mary ! I want a lyre with other strings,'

are worthy of remembrance. The single sonnet
of Gray hardly deserved the savage treatment
by which Wordsworth has immortalised it ; and
the sonnet work of William Lisle Bowles has a
certain literary interest on account of the in-
fluence— a somewhat inexplicable one, it must
be owned — which it exercised in the formation

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 39

of the poetic taste of Coleridge ; but, on the
whole, the prospect hereabouts is hardly a
cheerful one. In the study of the sonnets of
Wordsworth we feel at once that we are ascend-
ing to a new altitude, and gazing round on an
ampler horizon. If we take into consideration
both quality and mass of work, we may well
agree with Mr John Dennis that Wordsworth is
4 perhaps the greatest of English sonnet writers.1
Milton, indeed, reached a height which Words-
worth never gained ; but, while the one takes
us to a lofty and solitary peak where we can
never fail to be conscious of the distance of the
vale beneath, the other leads us to an elevated /
table-land of such expanse, that we can wander
at will, and in our wanderings forget that there
is a lower world. Milton, to change the figure,
overshadows us : we do not lose our personality,
but feel his rising before us, and shutting out
all besides. Wordsworth, on the contrary,
unless our mood be unalterably alien to his own,
possesses us, pervades us, transfuses his spirit
into our spirits, and makes us feel with him.
He does this in virtue of his strong humanity,
his abiding sympathy with what the author of
Ecce Homo calls ' the man in men,' this being,
as I take it, the living aggregate of those

4° THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

thoughts and passions which are distinctive of
men in whom the moral development has been
consentaneous with the emotional and intellec-
tual growth. Wordsworth moves us by the
sheer directness of his ethical and imaginative
insight ; and the craftsmanship of his sonnet-
work is noteworthy, for the most part, only as a
means of making this directness thoroughly
impressive. Few poets so great as Wordsworth
have been so deficient in what Goethe called the
daemonic element, the incalculable force which
touches and sways us, we know not why or how.
Wordsworth's effects are all explicable and cal-
culable ; we see ' the hidden pulse of the
machine*: he is, save in one or two memorable
instances, wanting in what has been called
natural magic; and the existence of this very
deficiency makes the charm and power of his
work all the more remarkable. Now and
then, in the sonnets, he catches a splendour
beyond the reach of art, as in the concluding
lines of the sonnet Composed on Westminster
Bridge : —

1 Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep
And all that mighty heart is lying still ; '—

but, as a rule, we are struck by the collectedness

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 4*

of the poet; by the fact that he is the master of
his conceptions, not their servant, saying to this
1 Go/ and it goeth, and to another ' Stay/ and it
stayeth. And yet he was throughout guided by
a sure instinct. He felt, if we may so put it, the
responsibilities of the sonnet ; and, in spite of
his imperfect theory of poetic language, which
so often led him astray, the style of the sonnets,
though sometimes austere, is hardly ever bald.
Nor do we find here any trace of Wordsworth's
other besetting sin, the sin of diffuseness and
limp expatiation. The poet whose work is self-
conscious, who writes what he will rather than
what he must, will always feel, as Wordsworth
felt, 'the weight of too much liberty/ and the
fetters of an arbitrary form like the sonnet seem
less like fetters than supports and wholesome
restraints. In the sonnets Wordsworth's style
is at its finest : it is nervous, sinewy, compact,
and yet always clear and fluent. His natural
language had a note of simple dignity, but its
naturalness was not always preserved ; for the
simplicity sometimes sank into puerility and the
dignity deteriorated into bombast. In the
sonnets, however, these lapses are almost non-
existent. They are not dithyrambic, but they
are always gravely eloquent, striking at the

42 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

opening a clear resonant key-note of lofty
emotion which is nobly sustained until the close.
A score of the best known — and in Wordsworth's
case the best known are the best — of the sonnets
would be a collection of verse the companion-
able value of which would be in its way
unsurpassed. Such poetic treasures as 'The
world is too much with us,' 'Earth hath not
anything to show more fair,' ' Great men have
been among us,' 'Milton, thou should'st be
living at this hour,' and a dozen others which
linger in the memory, have a tonic and invigor-
ating quality which it is difficult to over-
estimate. Critics of the Rydal poet have been
wont to divide readers into Wordsworthians and
non-Wordsworthians ; but in the presence of
these utterances, whose grace is a grace of
perfected strength, these distinctions fade away.
A refusal of homage would not merely stamp
a man as a non-Wordsworthian, but as one
for whom the highest poetical motives and
the most exquisite forms have no preciousness,
to whom they make no appeal. Concerning the
entire body of Wordsworth's work there will
always be wide differences of opinion founded on
inherent and ineradicable differences of taste ;
but upon the greatest of these sonnets only one

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 43

verdict is possible — that they are an addition
of inestimable value to the world's accumulated
store of imaginative wealth.

The true signs of the poetic nature were per-
haps more clearly discernible in Coleridge than
in his great compeer; but as a sonneteer he was
certainly Wordsworth's inferior. His sonnets
seem to us altogether wanting in distinction and
charm, with the further disadvantage of being
occasionally marred by the intrusion of a quality
for which, in Coleridge's time, the name ' spas-
modic ' had not been invented. Poor Hartley
Coleridge, who promised so much and performed
so little, produced many sonnets, and is, as a
sonnet-writer, as far in front of his father as he
is behind his father's friend. The beautiful
sonnet beginning —

' What was't awakened first the untried ear
Of that sole man who was all human kind?'

would have been more content-giving if the
interrogatory form had been dropped before
the close; but many of his sonnets have indubi-
table quality, and one or two of them — such,
for example, as * If I have sinned in act I may
repent,' and ( Let me not dream that I was made
in vain' — betray a combined vigour and subtlety

44 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

which makes us feel that great possibilities were
extinguished by the blight which withered the
singer's mournfully ineffectual career. Concern-
ing a host of Wordsworthian sonnets, of which
Sir Aubrey de Vere was the earliest and the
Rev. Charles Tennyson Turner the latest pro-
ducer, nothing needs to be said but that they
have everything of Wordsworth save the in-
forming power which made his sonnets so monu-
mental and memorable. Wordsworth's work is
easily imitable by congenial spirits, and these
imitations — probably for the most part uncon-
scious reproductions of the master's manner —
are by no means unworthy; but they have no
place in the history of art. The latter of the
two poets just mentioned did, however, produce
one sonnet of singular beauty, a sonnet not in
the least like Wordsworth, but with a strong
suggestion of George Herbert; and it seems to
me to be in its own way so perfect and delightful,
that I break the order of this survey to repro-
duce it in connection with the passing mention
of its author's name.

THE LATTICE AT SUNRISE

' As on my bed at dawn I mused and prayed,
I saw my lattice prankt upon the wall,
The flaunting leaves and flitting birds withal—

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 45

A sunny phantom interlaced with shade;
"Thanks be to heaven !" in happy mood I said,
"What sweeter aid my matins could befall
Than this fair glory from the East hath made ?
What holy sleights hath God, the Lord of all,
To bid us feel and see ! we are not free
To say we see not, for the glory comes
Nightly and daily, like the flowing sea;
His lustre pierceth through the midnight glooms;
And at prime hour, behold ! He follows me
With golden shadows to my secret rooms ! " '

Byron wrote few sonnets, but those few are
good; and the sonnet On Chilian^ with its fine
opening and its impressive close, may, without
exaggeration be called great. The London
group of nineteenth century poets — the Cockney
school as it was irreverently called — had its de-
fects and weaknesses, but it certainly maintained
the high traditions of the English sonnet. The
far-echoing fame of Hyperion and the odes has
done much to drown the faint, sweet music of
the sonnets of Keats,* but they remain a posses-
sion from which no lover of the precious things
of verse would care to part. The best known,
and among general readers the most highly es-
teemed, of these delicately cut cameos of poetry,
is undoubtedly the sonnet On first looking into
Chapmaii's Homer, and the singularly impres-
sive images to which the sestet is devoted fully

46 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

account for this high popular estimation; but it
may be more than doubted whether the com-
parative rank assigned to this sonnet can be
defended by disinterested criticism. The ma-
jority of discriminating judges will award the
palm to that overpoweringly beautiful composi-
tion which was the poet's last legacy to the world,
a sonnet rounded and perfect as the ( bright star '
which it invokes, of moving conception and
flawless workmanship, every line a delight, and
the whole an enduring joy. It is unfortunate
that so many of Keats' editors, Mr Main among
the number, should, in reprinting this last
sonnet, have adopted as the final line —

1 And so live ever or else swoon to death,'

instead of the alternative reading, which has at
least equal sanction —

1 Half passionless, and so swoon on to death,'

which is so much more in keeping with the
body of the sonnet, so much more characteristic,
so much more beautiful. Only less fine than
this supreme effort are the sonnets, ' The poetry
of earth is never dead,' ' When I have thoughts
that I may cease to be,' ' O, soft embalmer of the
still midnight/ * The day is gone, and all its

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 47

sweets are gone,' each full of the essential music,
the mobile grace of nature with which Keats
was so richly dowered, and each containing at
least one triumph of phrasing which touches the
very heart of the matter, and masters us at once.
Keats' sonnets were very frequently cast in the
Shakspearian mould; but his handling is so deft,
that in most of them we lose the feeling of the
recurring quatrains, and even of the concluding
couplet, and have the sense of inwrought unity
which seems to belong as of right to the true
Italian form. It is only the comparatively small
mass of Keats' sonnet work, certainly not any
deficiency in quality, which hinders him from
taking rank among the greatest of our son-
neteers, as well as among the greatest of our
poets.

Shelley's contribution is still more scanty,
though Mr Main has added to the number of his
sonnets by printing as such the successive strophes
or stanzas of the Ods to the West Wind, which
are certainly written in the sonnet form, though
they have too much abandonment, too little
restraint and individual completeness, — have, in
short, too much of the purely lyrical quality, —
to find a place among genuine sonnets. Leigh
Hunt, the ardent lover of both Keats and

48 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

Shelley, was a nineteenth-century troubadour
rather than a poet in the broadest and deepest
sense of that word ; but he had quick sensi-
bilities and a nimble hand, and in one well-
known wit - contest he distanced his great
compeers. Everyone remembers that Shelley,
Keats, and Hunt each undertook to write a
sonnet on the subject of the river Nile; and
whether we select Ozymandias, or, as we cer-
tainly ought, the more recently discovered
sonnet, 'Month after month the gathered rains
descend,' as Shelley's contribution, it must, I
think, take either the second or the third place,
the first being undoubtedly held by Hunt.
Hunt's sonnet is fairly familiar, but I cannot
forbear to quote it; and it may safely be said
that even in his most spontaneous productions
the poet never excelled this little bit of pleasant
task-work : —

' It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal stands, —
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.
Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
As of a world left empty of its throng

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 49

And the void weighs on us ; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.'

From this time forward noticeable sonnets grow
thicker and thicker in the field of English poetry,
and adequate criticism within the limits of a single
article becomes less and less possible. Hood's
extraordinary gift of a certain kind of humour,
and the insistent and tragical power of his
world-famed social lyrics, have hindered many
from fully recognising the flower-like grace of
his more purely imaginative serious poetry, and
as a sonnet-writer he is seldom mentioned,
though all his sonnets are delicately and richly
wrought, and at least two of them, Silence
and Death, deserve an honoured place in the
most select sonnet anthology. Those individual
qualities which give their peculiar flavour to
such poems as The Haunted House and The
Dream of Eugene Aram — their pervading
weirdness, their occasional grotesqueness — are
here sublimated and etherealised ; the body of
them has vanished, but the aroma remains, and
the charm is complete. To this first half of the
nineteenth century belong also the names of
Charles Lamb, Bryan Waller Procter, John

50 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

Clare — whose numerous sonnets are not among
his best things — Thomas Noon Talfourd — whose
sonnet On the Death of Queen Caroline is a
noble poem on an unworthy theme — Thomas
Lovell Beddoes, Samuel Laman Blanchard, and
Joseph Blanco White, who, like the often-men-
tioned * single-speech Hamilton,' is remembered
as a poet by one solitary utterance.

White's magnificent sonnet on Night has
been too often quoted for it to be necessary to
reproduce it here, and so much criticised that all
possible comment seems exhausted. Few will
withhold a general agreement from the verdict
of Coleridge, that it is ' the most grandly
conceived sonnet in the language'; but it is
certainly unfortunate that the execution of so
great a conception should not be more perfect.
The first impression it makes is almost over-
powering, but it bears hardly so well as might
be expected the test of repeated readings — a
disappointment which is wont to occur when
the strength of a poem resides in its thought
rather than its craftsmanship. Concerning the
two extant versions I disagree with Mr Main,
who regards the first as superior to the second ;
but even from the latter there is absent some
needed touch of perfecting grace, which, were it

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 51

there, would give the sonnet an assured and
unassailable supremacy.

As we progress farther into the century we
reach another of the great sonnet groups of our
literature, and are compelled to make another
pause. If we except Sappho, who is little more
than a shade, the roll of the women poets of
the ; 'world must be headed with the name of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning ; and her sonnets,
notably the series entitled l Sonnets from the
Portuguese/ are at the apex of the mass of
work which is her enduring pyramid of fame.
What Wordsworth in his sonnets did for the
high things of thought and ethical emotion,
Mrs Browning and a later poet, yet to be
spoken of, have done for the deep and secret
things of passion, using the word not in the
mere special sense to which usage has almost
confined it, but as comprehending all intense
and fervid outgoings of our nature towards
God, or country, or our human fellows, or
those aspects of nature which rouse within us
love or awe, wonder or hushed delight. The
poet in whom emotion generates thought will
almost inevitably have a narrower range than
the poet in whom thought supplies a justification
for emotion, and Mrs Browning's sweep is

52 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

certainly less extensive than Wordsworth's; but
there are in her sonnets a concentrated intensity
of feeling and a piercing, resonant utterance —
strong, yet with a pathetic quiver in it — which
thrill and melt us as we are thrilled and melted
by the voice of no other English singer. In her
verse, Godward aspiration, human love and
grief, the passion of sympathy and the passion
for beauty, the longing of a full nature to pour
out its fulness, reveal their very naked heart,
and we are impressed not merely by high poetry,
but by a great 'apocalypse of soul.' In the
case of any human being such an apocalypse
would have a strange and peculiar interest, but
when the revelation is of such a soul as Mrs
Browning's it becomes a thing of priceless value.
As we read we know not whether we are most
keenly touched by the poem or by the beating of
the poet's heart behind it, by the throb of warm
blood in its pulsating lines. The fine issues
reveal the spirit that has been finely touched; a
spirit to whom the things of the spirit were as
palpable as the things of sense — to whom, as to
the eye-blind but soul-seeing, Hugh Stuart Boyd :

' The sensuous and unsensuous seemed one thing,
Viewed from one level — earth's reapers at the sheaves
Scarce plainer than Heaven's angels on the wing.'

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 53

The purity and delicacy of Mrs Browning's
nature were attested by her power of distinguish-
ing very finely graduated 'shades of the higher
emotions, of beholding subtle correspondences,
of rendering what for most poets would be
merely sighings that cannot be uttered. In
such sonnets as Grief and Perplexed Music, V
strings which would have been snapt and
silenced for ever if struck by duller hands, yield
tones that are sweet and clear and full — tones to
which other hearts vibrate in faint but distin-
guishable echoes. It is, however, in the series
purporting to be * From the Portuguese,' that
Mrs Browning reveals the total potentialities of
her genius. These poems are the very apotheosis
of love; they form an avenue from the outer-
most courts of a pure and profound passion to
the innermost recesses of its curtained sanctuary ;
and yet in no one of them is there any violation
of sacred reserves, any profanation of the shrine <,
of love ; for the last solemn veil of the temple
remains unlifted, though we are brought near ^
enough to catch the odour of the incense which
clouds the altar, and the hymeneal song of the
invisible singers who chant before it.

In matters of mere art-technique the Sonnets
+rom the Portuguese represent Mrs Browning at

54 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

her point of highest achievement. Intense as
was her Shakspearian enthusiasm, she clearly
felt that in his so-called sonnets Shakspeare had
adopted an inferior form, and she remained
faithful to the nobler Italian model, which, in
the hands of Milton and Wordsworth, had been
turned to such triumphant account. Nor was
the effect of a choice of perfect form marred by
any of those eccentricities of treatment which
interfere with the fulness of our delight in some
of this poet's most delight-giving work. The
individual flavour is as distinct as elsewhere;
never was personality more clearly discernible;
but the style has cleared itself of its dross, of its
undue archaism, its ruggedness, its occasional
grating grotesqueness, and has, without losing
force, gained ease, clearness, balance, and those
qualities which in the mass we call classical. ^To
appraise this collection adequately is difficult ;
to overrate it is all but impossible.. The most
commonplace man or woman who has known
what it is to love purely and unselfishly feels that
his soul or her sbul, not less than the soul of Mrs
Browning, finds a voice in these high poems ;
and it can hardly be presumptuous to predict
% that for generations to come the Sonnets from
the Portuguese will remain, what they un-

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 55

doubtedly now are, the noblest anthology for I
noble lovers which our language has to show.

The singers of what may be called the Tenny-
sonian period are many, and most of them have
been sonneteers to a greater or less extent, but
the field is too wide to be reaped or even tithed
here. Lord Tennyson himself has written few
sonnets, and these few include one or two of
his feeblest things and none of his best. No
friendly critic would ever quote such an effusion
as The Bridesmaid; and even the sonnet on the
Montenegrins, strong and sonorous as it is,
seems more like a Miltonic or Wordsworthian
echo than an original strain. Lord Tennyson's
early friend Arthur Henry Hallam wrote son-
nets charged with a quiet beauty; and Mr
Frederick Tennyson, as well as his brother the
Rev. Charles Tennyson Turner, was a sonnet-
writer needing not to be ashamed. Of the
sonnet- work of Alford, Faber, Clough, the
younger Roscoes, John Sterling, R. S. Hawker,
and many others I must not stay to speak.
The sonnets of Mr Matthew Arnold, generally
devoted to the crystallisation of some elevated
ethical sentiment, have a simple austerity of
style which may almost be called ascetic. Those
of Alexander Smith, on the other hand, emulate

56 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

sometimes with fair success, the rich colour and
lavish imagery of Keats, who found another
follower in the young Scotch poet, David Gray,
whose early death robbed the world of a sweet if
not of a strong singer. The sonnets of Julian
Fane, particularly those addressed to his mother,
are thoroughly Shakspearian both in form and
flavour and are saturated with a true and touch-
ing tenderness. Mrs Pfeiffer's sonnets have been
much admired, and justly so, for they are indeed
admirable, but some of them would be even
more admirable if the condensation and elabora-
tion of the thought interfered less with the
transparency of the expressional vehicle. Those
of Miss Christina Rossetti have grace, sweetness,
unction, with a pensive charm as of a violet
growing on a grave. Miss Dora Greenwell is a
disciple of Mrs Browning, and has caught very
happily some of the delicate nuances of both her
feeling and style. Mr Robert Buchanan is a
poet of no mean rank, but his sonnets, though
often full of his special power, impress and
charm us less than some of his other work. The
solitary volume of verse which we owe to Mr
- Edward Dowden, though it has not been much
talked about, cannot be read by any genuine
lover of poetry without ardent admiration, and

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 57

some of the sonnets contained in it are of sin-
gularly delicate beauty. Mr Philip Bourke
Marston and Mr John Payne have done some
very exquisite sonnet-work; but their peculiar
quality is to a large extent derivative. Their
master is one who has many more followers than
he perhaps cares to acknowledge — a poet of fine
and subtle genius, and undoubtedly the greatest
of living sonneteers — Mr Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Perhaps the most obvious positive character-
istic of Mr Rossetti's poetry is its picturesque-
ness. He is not merely a painter and a poet,
but a painter-poet, which is a different thing.
He has too true a sense of the dignity of each
separate art, and of the inevitable limitations of
each vehicle of expression, to endeavour to paint
poems or to write pictures; but his imagination
is so concrete that its creations always present
themselves to him as things of form and colour,
and his sonnets spread themselves out like fair
paintings on the walls of the gallery of the
mind. Every poet's instinct prompts him to
embody thoughts and feelings in sensuous sym-
bols which can be grasped by the imagination;
and one of the tests by which we award prece-
dence in the poetic hierarchy is the measure of
success with which this embodiment is achieved.

58 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

In Mr Rossetti's case it is a large measure : we
know of none larger, and his place is among
the highest. We will not say that every one of
his sonnets would provide a motive for an actual
picture : both the form and colour may here and
there be too faintly indicated for reproduction
by palpable lines and pigments; but the effect
upon the mind of any one of them is analogous
to that produced by one of his own glowing
canvases. There are in both the same restful
harmonies, the same solemn splendour, the same
sad yearning, the same bounteousness of beauty;
and those of us who have been privileged to
•behold some of those special drawings or paint-
ings to which certain of the sonnets are avowedly
twin children of the master's art, turn from the
picture to the poem and from the poem back to
the picture, and know not which to choose,
because both are so full of the qualities of de-
light.

Mr Rossetti's imaginative treatment is both
spiritual and impassioned, the sensuous and the
super-sensuous are inextricably blended, and
when love is the theme of his utterances it is
for the most part a love of which we know not
the body from the soul. / There is a noteworthy
integrity/in his love sonnets which gives them a

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 59

peculiar interest and value. • No element is
wanting, none is unduly preponderant. The
poet can sing to the hautboy of the flame-winged
Passion of Love, or to the sweet notes of the
white winged harpist, who is Love's Worship,
declaring that —

1 Through thine hautboy's rapturous tone
Unto my lady still this harp makes moan,
And still she deems the cadence deep and clear.'

The first twenty-eight of Mr Rossetti's sonnets,
like the Sonnets from the Portuguese, form a
continuous series ; but in the former the situa-
tions are more varied, and the gradual transition
from brightness to gloom, instead of, as in Mrs
Browning's poems, from gloom to brightness,
leaves us in an entirely different mood. Mr
Rossetti's genius is, however, essentially sombre
in tone ; and even one of the earliest sonnets
which are the exultant outburst of a victorious
love closes with the question of mournful
presage :—

' O love, my love ! if I no more should see
Thyself, nor on the earth the shadow of thee,

Nor image of thine eyes in any spring —
How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope
The ground-whirl of the perished leaves of Hope,

The wind of Death's imperishable wing?3

60 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

This sombreness of effect is brought about in
a strange and subtle manner. I have spoken
of these sonnets as pictures, and in carrying out
the comparison one may say that this effect is
produced not by the use of dull colours, of
browns and greys and faded tints, but rather by
a miraculous mingling of rich and gorgeous
hues. Mr Ruskin has somewhere observed that
good colour cannot possibly be gay colour, and
here the colour is always good, but gay never.
Seldom in literature has there been such a com-
bination of splendour and sadness, and both the
splendour and the sadness are made all the more
impressive by marvellous manipulative art. No
poet has ever gained a greater amount of expres-
sional effect by the mere sound quality of words,
singly and in combination, than Mr Rossetti.
He has a habit, not sufficiently obtrusive to
become a trick, of ending the sestet, and oc-
casionally the octave, with a line containing
some one long sonorous word of open vowels
and the most producible consonants, with now
and then an additional weak syllable, which
prolongs the movement and gives a felt weight
and solemnity. An example may be found in
the lines just quoted, but there are many
others : —

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 61

* With sweet confederate music favourable,'
' His hours elect in choral consonancy.' —
' Follow the desultory feet of Death,'—
' Their refuse maidenhood abominable,' —
' Sleepless, with cold commemorative eyes,' —
' The shame that loads the intolerable day.'

These and such lines as these, impinge upon
sense and soul like a cannon-ball, and bury
themselves so deeply in the memory that they
cannot be unearthed. Then, too, Mr Rossetti is
a master of monosyllabic words, generally so
hazardous both to dignity and grace, and uses
them freely, often through a whole line, and
sometimes through two consecutive lines, and
even into a third, with no loss, but a clear gain
of both literary and emotional effect. These may
seem trivial things ; but those to whom poetry
is an art as well as an inspiration know that
nothing is trivial which can be used as a means
for stamping fine and enduring impressions.
There was inspiration enough and to spare for
the tuneful breath to which we listen in such
sonnets as Love-sight, Love-sweetness, Winged
Hours, Secret Parting, and Mary Magdalene •
but inspiration alone would never have realised
their accomplished perfectness. It is the inspira-
tion that masters us in such intense and sombre
utterances as Vain Virtttes, The Surfs Shame,

62 THE SONNET IN ENGLAND

The Refusal of Aid between Nations^ and the
great and terrible Lost Days ; but it is art
which assures to inspiration the mastery. The
man who wrote the sonnet For a Venetian
Pastoral by Giorgione, which for beauty, pure,
absolute, flawless, has no equal in the volumes
of any English poet, is above all things an
artist ; and for sonnet craftsmanship which leaves
us with the pleasant languor of supreme satis-
faction, the delicious drowsiness of fulfilled
delight, we know of nothing comparable to these
great gifts which we owe to Dante Gabriel
Rossetti.

To survey the history of the sonnet in Eng-
land is a pleasant task, for the record is one of
continued and beautiful growth. There seemed
little promise in the Italian exotic which Sir
Thomas Wyat planted in English soil ; but it
has flourished and blossomed and borne fruit
abundantly. Arbitrary as is the form of the
sonnet, its arbitrariness must be in accord with
great expressional laws, or so many poets would
not have chosen it as the vehicle for their finest
fancies, their loftiest thoughts, their intensest
emotions. This choice, made so often and
vindicated so splendidly, has produced a litera-
ture within a literature, a domain within a

THE SONNET IN ENGLAND 63

domain, and though it is composed of scanty
plots of ground, they spread over a wide expanse
through which we may wander long, and yet
leave many of its flowers unseen and unculled.
Rich as the sonnet literature of England is now,
it is becoming every day richer and fuller of
potential promise, and though the possibilities of
the form may be susceptible of exhaustion, there
are no present signs of it, but only of new and
bounteous developments. Even were no addi-
tion made to the store which has accumulated
through more than two centuries, the sonnet-
work of our English poets would remain for ever
one of the most precious of the intellectual
possessions of the nation.

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE
(1882)

•MosT cultivated people of this generation have
heard of, but comparatively few have seen, the
solitary volume of a little magazine called The
Germ, which was, during its short life, the
organ of a band of young art workers, who were
destined not only to become the founders of a
new pictorial school, but to exert a diffused yet
very recognisable influence over the entire
region in which the artistic spirit can make
itself at home. These youthful revolutionaries
— one of the most active of whom was still in
his teens, while others had only just left them
behind — had become convinced that modern
traditions had led painters away from the only
true principle and the only worthy practice of
their art ; that accepted conventions had taken
the place of truths of nature ; that painting had
therefore become more of a handicraft and less of

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 65

an inspiration ; and that to find examples of
veracious and noble workmanship it was ne-
cessary to go back to the men who were the
immediate predecessors of Raphael, and whose
work remained as the precious memorial of a
time when art had not ceased to be simple,
sincere, and religious. This return to mediaeval
antiquity suggested a name for the reforming
band, which soon became known to the world at
large as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and
to be initiated as the P.R.B. The original
Brotherhood was a company of seven, consisting
of five painters — William Holman Hunt, Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, James
Collinson, and Frederic George Stephens ; one
sculptor, Thomas Woolner ; and one youth who
had not then entered upon any definite career,
William Michael Rossetti. Reformers are
necessarily propagandists, and it would have
been strange if the almost religious ardour of
the Brotherhood had not sought for some
medium of appeal to the outside unregenerate
world. In a day of newspapers and reviews a
periodical publication of some kind seemed the
most natural vehicle of utterance; and at the
suggestion of one or more of the Brothers
— Dante Rossetti being the prime mover

66 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE

— it was resolved to set on foot a small
magazine, in which the seven, and those who
were in harmony with them, should speak their
message and give some indication of the practical
outcome of it. The magazine was to be the
organ and, in the main, the production of the
Brethren alone, among whom were to be divided
the hypothetical profits which, it is needless to
say, never became actual ; and while others
were to be freely welcomed as contributors, they
were only to be regarded as outsiders — artistic
proselytes of the gate. To one of these out-
siders, however, the new venture owed its
original and best-known title. At a meeting of
the Brotherhood and a few friends held some
time in the year 1849 in the studio of Mr Dante
Rossetti in Newman Street, various names were
suggested, and the final choice was made from a
short list submitted by a yet living artist, Mr
William Cave Thomas, at that time a young
painter whose fine imagination, cultured by
severe German training, had won for him a
prize in the competitions for frescoes and other
decorative work in the Houses of Parliament.
The approved title, The Germ, testified at once
to the modesty and to the assured confidence of
the Brotherhood. It was a little thing, a seed

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 67

cast into the ground, but cast there in full
belief that it would germinate, becoming, per-
chance, in after-days a great tree, in whose fruit
men might delight and in whose shade they
might rest. This significance was, however,
hidden from the crowd ; and there is a legend to
the effect that some careless Gallic, reading the
title on the wrapper as he lounged in a book-
seller's shop, did not even recognise the word,
but pronounced it in a questioning sort of way
as gurm, with a hard g, which pronunciation
was humorously adopted by two or three of
those most immediately concerned — a fact which
must have supplied a foundation for the report
that it was originally an affectation of the
Brotherhood instead of the accidental error of
an alien. Concerning these external matters,
which are not of much importance — though
they have an interest of their own — it is only
necessary to add that, after the publication of the
second number, it was found that not only was
there a total absence of anything in the shape of
profit, but the presence of a loss too large to be
repeatedly encountered by the seven Brethren;
and the expenses of producing the third and
fourth numbers were undertaken by the printer,
Mr G. F. Tupper, of Clement's Lane, Lombard

68 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE

Street, who had more than a merely commercial
interest in the work. Mr Tupper also changed
the name of the magazine, The Germ giving
place to Art and Poetry, a title which was
certainly more accurately descriptive than that
which it superseded, but also much more
commonplace, and altogether wanting in sug-
gestiveness. When it is said that each number
contained forty-eight closely-printed large octavo
pages of letterpress and was illustrated with an
etching, it will be very clear to those having
practical experience of such matters that the
inevitably small sale made the continued exist-
ence of the magazine, save as a costly hobby,
altogether impossible ; and the four issues,
which when bound make a somewhat slender
volume, were all that appeared. It had, how-
ever, found its public — its ' audience fit, though
few ' — had done its work, and — it may be added
without exaggeration — had in a way made its
mark. As the first, and indeed the only, official
manifesto or apologia of Pre-Raphaelitism, it has
a place in the history both of English literature
and English art ; but apart from its propagan-
dist aim, which indeed, eludes rather than
importunes recognition, it has a permanent
interest and value as a storehouse of the early

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 69

tentative experiments in critical thought and
creative work of young minds who have, since
its day, in many ways impressed the world.

The main supports of the undertaking were
undoubtedly three members of a richly-endowed
family — Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and
Christina Rossetti. To the first, as has already
been said, the original idea of The Germ was
almost certainly due; the second acted as its
editor throughout; and the third added much to
its value by contributing, under the pen-name
of Ellen Alleyne, a number of tenderly beautiful
poems, in which old chords of emotion were
struck in such a way as to make them seem new.
In the four numbers there are fifty-one contribu-
tions, and of these twenty-three are from the
pens of the two brothers and the sister; seven
being by D. G. Rossetti, nine by Mr W. M.
Rossetti, and seven by Miss Rossetti, a series
of six ( Sonnets for Pictures ' by the first-named
being counted not as six but as one.

By far the greater number of the twenty-three
Rossetti contributions are poems, a fact which
betokens a keener instinct for creative than for
controversial activity. Indeed, the magazine
differs totally and very pleasantly from the typi-
cal sectarian organ — which is, as a rule, too

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polemical for endurance by non-polemical people
— in addressing itself mainly to those who were
already more or less sympathetic, and addressing
•even them, not in logical hortative fashion, but
allusively through images of the imagination
rather than mere conceptions of the intellect.
To sweep away the malaria of false tradition by
storms of sad or angry rhetoric, was not a course
which seemed to commend itself to the writers
in The Germ. They chose instead to endea-
vour after the purification of the atmosphere by
charging it with a new emotional element,
which would come not with observation, so that
a man might say, ' Lo, here,' or ' Lo, there,' but
should slowly transform the air of the world of
art and make it once more healthful. One poem
of those just mentioned, the sonnet by Mr
William Rossetti printed on the cover of each
number, is undoubtedly a setting forth of the
unavoidably militant intellectual attitude of the
Brotherhood; but there is a largeness and uni-
versality in it which forbids us to regard it as a
party utterance. Its laboured concentration of
ideas tells against it as a poem; but it is worth
reproducing as a brief statement of what the
writer and his fellow-workers considered one
essential portion of their message : —

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 71

'When whoso merely hath a little thought

Will plainly think the thought which is in him —

Not imaging another's bright or dim,
Not mangling with new words what others taught;
When whoso speaks, from either having sought

Or only found, will speak, not just to skim

A shallow surface with words made and trim,
But in that very speech the matter brought :

Be not too keen to cry — " So this is all !
A thing I might myself have thought as well,

But would not say it, for it was not worth ! "
Ask : " Is this truth ? " For is it still to tell

That, be the theme a point or the whole earth,
Truth is a circle, perfect, great or small ?'

The writer of this sonnet was not only the
editor of The Germ\ he was also by far its
most industrious contributor. His poems have
subtlety and freshness of emotion and graceful
firmness of handling ; but they lack impressive
individuality, and we recognise in them family
features rather than personal expression. Al-
ready, however, Mr W. M. Rossetti was show-
ing his bent towards criticism; and four reviews
by him — one published in each number of the
magazine — if not in themselves remarkable,
must be pronounced extraordinary work for a
youth of eighteen, writing in the year 1850,
when in the critical region the Philistines were
supreme. The books noticed were ' The Bothie '
of Arthur Hugh Clough ; the earliest volume of

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Mr Matthew Arnold's verse; Mr Cayley's now
forgotten poem, 'Sir Reginald Mohun'; and the
* Christmas Eve and Easter Day ' of Mr Brown-
ing. In all these criticisms one notices a
studious thoroughness, an obvious attempt to
catch the informing vital quality of the work
under examination, which must have brought a
feeling of relief and enlargement to those who
were getting somewhat weary of the rough-and-
ready generalising and classifying style of the
literary tasters of the quarterly reviews. Per-
haps the most interesting of the four was the
last, which, though nominally a review of Mr
Browning's companion studies of the spiritual
life, was devoted to a defence of the poet's
general manner, and to an exposition of the
doctrine — then little understood in,. England —
that in all true art there is such absolute union
and interdependence of matter and form as to
render it impossible rightly to estimate the latter
apart from the former. It was then given to
but few to see clearly that to judge any style per
se} and declare it good or bad, is always more or
less absurd, just as it is absurd to judge of a
garment without consideration of the person for
whom or the use for which it is intended; in-
deed, in the case of style the absurdity is greater,

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for it is more than the garment of thought — it
is, or ought to be, its very body, its visible incar-
nation. Therefore, argued the young critic,
'appropriateness of treatment to subject ....
lies at the root of all controversy on style;
this is the last and the whole test. . . . The
question of style (manner) being necessarily
subordinate to that of subject (matter), it is not
for the reader to dispute with the author on his
mode of rendering, provided that should be
accepted as embodying (within the bounds of
grammatical logic), the intention preconceived/
It will at once be seen how directly this doctrine,
here applied only to literature, bears upon the
pictorial methods of the Brotherhood; so directly
that it might have been meant to meet some of
the most popular objections to their work. Of
course it does not cover the whole ground of the
Pre-Raphaelite controversy, for satisfying com-
pleteness in the presentation of an artistic motive
is never absolute but always relative, one truth
having to yield to another which has a more
insistent claim; but it meets the conventional
sneer against the ugliness, the awkwardness, the
crudity, the hundred sins of which the Pre-
Raphaelites were supposed to be guilty, by the
demand, which it is impossible to set aside as

74 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE

irrelevant, that their achievement should be
judged by the measure of adequacy with which
it realised its intention. That the intention
might itself be unworthy was indeed possible;
but to decide this an appeal must be made to a
higher and finer criticism than was at that day
current.

The subordination of manner to matter, of
form to substance, which is implicitly hinted at
in this review was explicitly and much more
unguardedly insisted on in two papers entitled
* The Subject in Art/ which were contributed to
the first and third numbers of The Germ by
Mr John Lucas Tupper, a relative of Mr Tupper
the printer, already referred to, but unconnected
with the popular writer and so-called poet of
that name. He died in middle-age in the year
1879, and in a record of his work, written shortly
after his decease, I find it stated that ( his mind,
in matters of art, was peculiarly scientific,' a
criticism amply borne out by evidence which
these papers provide. The literary style of them
is bald, inflexible, and even involved, resembling
in many ways the style of Bishop Butler ; but
when the thought is once apprehended, it is
seen to have the systematic logical coherence
which belongs to the scientific treatment of a

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 75

theme. One point is immediately made plain,
that to the writer the subject is in Art almost
everything ; that at any rate it is the one thing
which supplies us with a standard by which to
award artistic precedence. ' Works of Fine
Art,' we are told, ( delight us by the interest the
objects they depict excite in the beholder, just as
those objects in nature would excite his interest;
if by any association of ideas in the one case, by
the same in the other, without reference to the
representations being other than the objects
they represent. ... At the same time, it is not
disallowed that a subsequent pleasure may and
does result upon reflecting that the objects con-
templated were the result of human ingenuity.'
As these sentences are taken from an article to
which, among the prose contributions to The
Germ, the place of honour is given, it must be
taken as a sort of official utterance ; and we are
compelled by it to regard the Pre-Raphaelite
movement as primarily intellectual and moral
rather than purely artistic. Art, we are told,
consists of the ingenious representation of
natural objects, and the main aim of the repre-
sentation is to excite the same interest and
arouse the same emotions which would be excited
and aroused by the objects themselves, a quite

7 6 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE

subsidiary interest being allowed to inhere in
the * ingenuity ' of the representation. Such a
theory sounds appallingly prosaic and mechani-
cal. It is certainly a natural outcome, not of
the art temperament which thinks of creation
and craftsmanship alone, and cares for nothing
beyond the perfect embodiment of its concep-
tions ; but of the grave ethical mood which
regards pencil and pigment as moral agencies to
be used just in the same way that the preacher
uses written or spoken words. Merely * decora-
tive works,' howsoever satisfying they may be to
the hunger after beauty, have no word to speak
either to the conscience or to the reflective intel-
lect ; and the writer is therefore consistent in
declaring of them that they * are not Fine Art
at all.' He ignores and really seems unable to
understand the possibility of finding elevated
enjoyment in the contemplation of colour as
colour, or form as form, and even goes so far as
to assert that the first idea suggested by a
painting of dead game or of cut fruit is that it is
a representation of 'something to eat'; a view
of the matter which would seem strange to most
of us wheresoever encountered, but strangest of
all, surely, in an essay written by a painter bent
on unfolding the scope and purpose of his art.

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 77

I draw attention to the extravagances not for
the sterile purpose of holding up to ridicule the
crudities of some of the earlier disciples of Pre-
Raphaelitism, but because there could be no
stronger testimony to the faith of the Brother-
hood in the central truth of their doctrine than
the calm simplicity^ with which they allowed
it to be pushed to extremes of application that
could not fail to be stumbling-blocks in the way
of those who were asked to receive it. Such
deliverances are also worth quoting for another
reason. Pre-Raphaelitism is vaguely identified
in many minds with the dogma embodied in the
familiar formula, * Art for Art's sake'; and this
essay of Mr Tupper exhibits more strongly,
though not more distinctly, than certain other
papers in( The Germ, the fundamental anta-
gonism between them. Art, to the Brother-
hood, existed not for its own sake, but rather
'for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for
instruction in righteousness'; and this was not
an accidental and separable element of their
teaching, but the very heart and life of it. The
ethical message of Pre-Raphaelitism is embodied,
with greater beauty of form and cunning of
dialectic than seem to have been at Mr Tupper's
command, in a long * Dialogue on Art,' published

78 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE

in the last number of the magazine, and in-
tended, had its author lived, to be the first of a
series ; but he was removed by death shortly
before this latest fragment of his work was given
to the world. His name was John Orchard, and
he was a young artist whose work in painting,
though unknown to me and to all but a few,
was. I am assured by one in every way compe-
tent to judge it, full not only of promise, but of
performance ; rememberable, however, in virtue
of quality not of mass, for l ill health, almost
amounting to infirmity — his portion from child-
hood— rendered him unequal to the bodily
labour inseparable from his profession ; and in
the course of his short life, whose youth was
scarcely consummated, he exhibited from time
to time only a very few small pictures, and
these, as regards public recognition, in no way
successfully/ The interlocutors in the dialogue
are four in number, and the names given to
them — Kalon, Sophon, Kosmon, and Christian
— indicate the positions from which they regard
Art, Kalon's view is in the main the purely
aesthetic one, Sophon's the philosophic, Kosmon's
the scientific, while in Christian's plea for the
moral and spiritual meaning and purpose of Art
the author utters his own thought. In his first

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 79

contribution to the colloquy Christian says of
the artist —

He should deem his art a sacred treasure, intrusted to
him for the common good ; and over it he should build, of
the most precious materials, in the simplest, chastest, and
truest proportions, a temple fit for universal worship : instead
of which, it is too often the case that he raises above it an
edifice of clay ; which, as mortal as his life, falls, burying
both it and himself under a heap of dirt. To preserve him
from this corruption of his art, let him erect for his guidance
a standard awfully high above himself. Let him think of
Christ ; and what he would not show to a nature as pure as
His, let him never be seduced to work on, or expose to the
world.

KOSMON : Oh, Kalon, whither do we go ? Greek art
is condemned, and satire hath got its death-stroke. The
beautiful is not the beautiful unless it is fettered to the
moral ; and virtue rejects the physical perfections, lest she
should fall in love with herself, and sin and cause sin.

CHRISTIAN : Nay, Kosmon. Nothing pure — nothing
that is innocent, chaste, unsensual— whether Greek or
satirical, is condemned : but everything — every picture,
poem, statue, or piece of music — which elicits the sensual,
viceful, and unholy desires of our nature— is, and that
utterly. The beautiful was created the true, morally as well
as physically ; vice is a deformment of virtue, not of form,
to which it is a parasitical addition— an accretion which can
and must be excised before the beautiful can show itself as
it was originally made, morally as well as formally perfect.
How we all wish the sensual, indecent, and brutal away
from Hogarth, so that we might show him to the purest
virgin without fear or blushing.'

Further on in the dialogue Kosmon contends
that * Christian wants Art like Magdalen Hos-

8o

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pitals, where the windows are so contrived that
all of earth is excluded, and only heaven is
seen ;' going on to plead that ' the animal part
of man wants as much caring for as the spiritual :
God made both, and is equally praised through
each.' To these and other objections to his
view Christian replies —

So long as the pursuits, pastimes, and pleasures of
mankind be innocent and chaste — with you all, heartily, I
believe it matters little how or in what form they be enjoyed.
Pure water is certainly equally pure whether it trickle from
the hillside or flow through crystal conduits ; and equally
refreshing whether drunk from the iron bowl or the golden
goblet ; only the crystal and gold will better please some
natures than the hillside and the iron. . . . Thus, my friends,
you perceive that I am neither for building a wall nor for
contriving windows so as to exclude light, air, and earth.
As much as any of you I am for every man's sitting under
his own vine, and for his training, pruning, and eating its
fruit how he pleases. Let the artist paint, write, or carve,
what and how he wills, teach the world through sense or
through thought — I will not dissent ; I have no patent to
entitle me to do so ; nay, I will be thoroughly satisfied with
whatsoever he does, so long as it is pure, unsensual, and
earnestly true. But as the mental is the peculiar feature
that places man apart from and above animals, so ought all
that he does to be apart from and above their nature ;
especially in the fine arts, which are the intellectual perfec-
tion of the intellectual. And nothing short of this intellec-
tual perfection — however much they may be pictures,
poems, statues, or music — can rank such works to be works
of Fine Art. They may have merit — may be useful, and
hence, in some sort, have a purpose ; but they are as much
works of Fine Art as Babel was the Temple of Solomon.

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 81

Enough has been quoted to show the high
spiritual aim of the Brotherhood, an aim to
which even their passion for veracity of presen-
tation was subordinated. Truthfulness in Art
was pursued not as an end but as a means to
the achievement of a great ethical purpose; and
the witness of Art to holiness was declared to be
as distinct as the witness of that Puritanism
which, in the interests of holiness, had declared
Art an unclean thing. It has, however, already
been noted that dogmatic or even expository
utterances form but a very small portion of the
contents of The Germ, and the portion, too,
which is, as a whole, least attractive, save to
those who are interested in tracing the history
and development of art ideas. What is done is
of more import and interest than theories of the
manner in which it should be done; and one
turns without regret from Mr Tupper's scho-
lastic definitions, and even from Mr Orchard's
eloquent dialectic, to the poems and etchings
which were among the earliest blades that
sprouted from the new seed — things pleasant in
themselves, and pleasanter for their promise of
harvest.

Midway between the purely critical and the
purely creative work stands a little biographical

8 2 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE

study entitled, ( Hand and Soul,' a story of the
days and works of a painter, one Chiaro dell'
Erma, written by Mr Dante Rossetti, and appar-
ently meant by him to be a setting forth of his
ideal of the artistic life. The Germ contains
nothing with a more insistent charm than this
piece of portraiture, which is instinct with a beau-
tiful naivete, almost unique in modern writing;
with a singular simplicity, austere but never bald,
having that nameless grace and glamour after
which elaboration often labours in vain; and
with an impressive unction, like that of which
we are conscious as we turn over the illuminated
pages of some book of devotions which has given
words to the wordless sighs of generations of
penitents. The little story was a prophecy in
words that was to be fulfilled in lines and
colours : it possessed just the pictorial qualities
which years afterwards made the pictured shapes
of the Palm-bearing Sybil and the Blessed
Damozel for ever memorable to all who stood
before them. It is the record of the outer and
inner life of a painter ; of how he yearned for
fame, but when he found that fame was lightly
won, cared no more to strive, but only to live
his own life and take his own pleasure ; how he
was arrested in his course by hearing speech of a

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youth who had been faithful when he had been
faithless ; how he then took to work diligently,
so that no day more might be lost, but gaining
fame, found that a weight was still at his heart;
how, when he questioned himself, he feared that,
being glad in his work, he had mistaken for
faith the worship of beauty, and accordingly set
himself to the presentment of moral greatness,
not dealing, as heretofore, with the action and
passion of human life, but with cold symbolism
and abstract impersonation, so that men no more
cared to look upon his work; and how, finally,
there appeared to him an image of his own soul
in the fashion of a beautiful woman in sad-
coloured garments, who told him that he had
erred in saying coldly to the mind what God
had said to the heart warmly, that God needed
not his help in strengthening Him among men,
bidding him * work from thine own heart simply,
for His heart is as thine when thine is wise and
humble, and He shall have understanding of
thee,' leaving with him this final message,
'Know that there is but this means whereby
thou mayst serve God with man — set thine
hand and thy soul to serve man with God.'

This narrative study makes manifest the
essential spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism, and along

84 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE

with some of the poems by the same writer and
by his sister, Miss Rossetti, may be accepted as
a satisfying concrete embodiment of them.
These poems, or the greater number of them,
are still better known, having been printed in
the volumes of verse given to the world by the
authors in later years ; but in some cases the
final form differs widely from the original one,
and in every example of this difference with
which I have acquainted myself the later version
shows that the firm hand of the master has
given the needed touch of grace to the tentative
'prentice work of the learner. The uncollected
work I shall not disinter. One or two poems
tempt me very strongly, notably a finely-felt piece
of meditative description by Mr Dante Rossetti,
entitled 'The Carillon — Antwerp and Bruges';
but so long as the writers live, it is theirs to say
by what utterances the world shall know them.
The poems familiar to Mr Rossetti's present-day
readers which first saw the light in The Germ
were ' My Sister's Sleep,' ' The Blessed Damozel/
four of the ' Sonnets for Pictures,' and a poem
there called * On the Cliffs,' which appears in the
volume as 'The Sea Limits,' with several happy
variations, and four stanzas instead of the
original two. One may, perhaps, without im-

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propriety, show how under these last touches the
poetical work of Mr Rossetti, beautiful from the
first, has gained its finality of achieved perfection,
by giving the two forms of that sonnet on the
* Venetian Pastoral' in the Louvre, which is
attributed to Giorgione, and is certainly instinct
with the spirit of that inspired and inspiring
master. Here is the sonnet as it appeared in
The Germ :—

' Water, for anguish of the solstice — yea,
Over the vessel's mouth still widening
Listlessly dipt to let the water in
With slow, vague gurgle. Blue, and deep away,
The heat lies silent at the brink of day.
Now the hand trails upon the viol-string
That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,
Mournful with complete pleasure. Her eyes stray
In distance; through her lips the pipe doth creep
And leave them pouting; the green-shadowed grass
Is cool against her naked flesh. Let be :
Do not now speak unto her lest she weep,
Nor name this ever. Be it as it was —
Silence of heat and solemn poetry.'

And here is the reading given in the volume of
1870 :—

' Water, for anguish of the solstice — nay,
But dip the vessel slowly — nay, but lean
And hark how at its verge the wave sighs in-
Reluctant. Hush ! Beyond all depth away
The heat lies silent at the brink of day :

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Now the hand trails upon the viol-string
That sobs, and the brown faces cease to sing,
Sad with the whole of pleasure. Whither stray
Her eyes now, from whose mouth the slim pipes creep
And leave it pouting, while the shadowed grass
Is cool against her naked side ? Let be :
Say nothing now unto her lest she weep,
Nor name this ever. Be it as it was —
Life touching lips with Immortality.

No lover and student of poetry will miss to
recognise either the solemn and subduing loveli-
ness of the original model or the subtle feeling
for absolute Tightness which in the finished
work has transformed beauty of suggestion into
the rarer beauty of adequate and utter realisa-
tion. The reader who has any feeling for the
language of rhythm will mark how much of a
certain precision of interpretative rendering is
gained by the added pauses in the second and
fourth verses — pauses that he instinctively
lengthens, as if to give the ear time to attune
itself to the low sighing of the wave; or, if this
be too purely a point in technique to arrest his
attention, he will surely note the keenness of
imaginative sensation, which, by changing the
insistently audible gurgle into a sigh, which we
must wait and hush to hear, has given so dif-
ferent and so much truer a quality to the cool
sound which, save the sob of the viol-string,

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 87

is the only one to break, if indeed it do not
rather intensify, the languid silence of the noon.
The eighth verse has become perfectly musical
and perfectly expressive, the early version not
being quite either; and the change, which begins
here and runs through the following verses,
from the indicative to the interrogatory mode,
informs the interpretation with the beautiful
mystery of fulfilled delight which is the supreme
charm of the thing interpreted. Or, not to
mention minor matters, such as the gain of the
epithet * slim,' which is a picturesque touch, one
might stay to mark the substitution of ' naked
side ' for * naked flesh,' which in nine cases out
of ten would be only the exchange of a strong
word for a weak one, but is here the effectual
stroke of artistic masterhood — the gain not
merely of the one needed vowel sound, though
that is something, but of a truer rendering of
the spirit of work from which aggressively
sensuous realism is altogether excluded, and in
which the appeal is not to sense, but to emotion.
Had the sonnet been for a Rubens instead of
for a Giorgione, the 'flesh' would have re-
mained : here it strikes a false note, and so it
goes — to its own place. Of the relative weight
and value of the concluding verse in the early

88 A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE

and in the late form respectively little need be
said. The first conclusion,

' Silence of heat and solemn poetry,'

is doubtless a due and full setting forth of the
sensuous and imaginative quality of the work
celebrated, but it is redundant, a saying over
again of what has been said before. There is
something remaining to be said. The picture
has not merely its quality; it has its mystery,
its secret, its soul — unknown, perhaps unknow-
able; its vision — unapprehended, perhaps un-
apprehensible; but may not the mystery, the
secret, the soul, the vision be this —

' Life touching lips with Immortality ' ?

It would be interesting to go in like manner
through the two versions of ( The Blessed
Damozel,' which appeared in the second number
of The Germ, and see how by rejection or addi-
tion of stanza or phrase the same perfecting has
been accomplished; but the task must be reserved
for other time than this, and I must leave for
the present the work of this weightiest con-
tributor to the little magazine, and also that of
Miss Rossetti, not because the latter is not almost
equally delightful, but because readers may find

A PRE-RAPHAELITE MAGAZINE 89

most of it in her published volumes, unchanged
generally in feature and expression. A hope
must, however, be expressed that the writer may
some day be induced to republish a poem en-
titled ' Repinings,' containing one or two descrip-
tive passages which move the imagination and
linger in the memory. The remaining poetical
contents of the thin volume call for no special
comment; but it is pleasant to find the chief
place in the first number given to two poems by
the then little-known sculptor of the Brotherhood
— poems which were the first instalment of the
tender and gracious monody known to the world
as ' My Beautiful Lady.' These are followed by
a sonnet on * The Love of Beauty,' from the pen
of a now distinguished painter, not otherwise
known as a poet, Mr Ford Madox Brown. The
peculiar mediaeval spirituality of the new move-
ment found a delicate metrical embodiment in a
poem by another of the seven brethren, Mr
James Collinson, * The Child Jesus; a Record
typical of the Five Sorrowful Mysteries,' the
beauty of which is at once severe, pensive, and
solemn. The first and last of these poems are
illustrated by etchings ; Mr Holman Hunt accom-
panying Mr Woolner's work with two designs,
the second of which is characterised by strong,

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passionate realisation; and Mr Collinson mating
his own poem with a beautiful invention —
archaic indeed, but not therefore unattractive to
those who are generally repelled by archaism,
because so evidently sincere and spontaneous.
The etchings in the other two numbers have
both Shakspearian motives. Mr Madox Brown's
farewell of Cordelia to her sisters is the more
ambitious, and has good qualities of composition,
but cannot be spoken of as pleasing or even
interpretative, Cordelia having the simper of a
rather silly and conceited girl delivering herself
of some moral platitude, while her sisters are
simply two ill-tempered women resenting the
gratuitous homily. The head of Regan has
character, however, but is too suggestive of Blake,
and is probably a reminiscence. It is, however,
only just to add that the work was executed
very hurriedly to supply the place of an etching
which had been prepared by Mr D. G. Rossetti,
but at the last moment rejected by him as inade-
quate. Mr W. H. Daverell's ' Viola and Olivia '
is in no way noteworthy, and, considered as
etchings, the four illustrations must be pro-
nounced amateurish and unimpressive, being so
largely deficient in that impulsive freedom of
treatment which it is the glory of the etching

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needle to secure. What worth they have inheres
in their quality as designs.

Of two suggestive articles no mention has
been made. The first of these, an essay on ' The
Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art/ by
Mr John Seward, another young painter, covers
much of the same ground that is traversed by
Mr Tupper and Mr Orchard; but is specially
interesting as showing the true nature of the
impulse which drew the Brotherhood and its
associates to the work of the Pre-Raphael
painters. The other article is of a very different
character. It is a critical analysis by Mr
Coventry Patmore of the character of Macbeth,
intended to prove that a * design of illegitimately
obtaining the crown of Scotland had been con-
ceived by Macbeth, and that it had been com-
municated by him to his wife prior to his first
meeting with the witches/ of whose evil sugges-
tions the action and catastrophe of the play are
commonly supposed to be the results. This
view of the tragedy, then novel, has of late been
popularised by the subtly-conceived impersona-
tion of Mr Henry Irving, and expounded with
weight and lucidity by Mr E. R. Russell of
Liverpool, one of the few provincial journalists
who to literary facility add fine and wide culture;

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but Mr Patmore was the first to break new
ground, and his study really left little in the
way of additional proof to be gathered together
by those coming after him. In soundness,
sanity, and sympathetic insight into the essential
spirit of Shakspeare's portraiture, it offers a
pleasing contrast to some of the eccentric
banalites which have of late years presented
themselves as contributions towards the compre-
hension of the great master's work.

Such are the principal contents of a magazine
which will always retain its interest for lovers
both of pictorial and .literary art. Copies are
anything but numerous, and in those that have
been bound it often happens that the key to the
authorship of the various articles and poems is
missing, through the neglect of the binder to
preserve the covers of the separate numbers, on
the inside page of which are given the names of
the writers in all the numbers after the first.
The book is seldom in the market, and many
booksellers' catalogues may be searched for it in
vain. The etched plates have possibly not been
preserved; but if the consent of the editor and
principal writers were obtained, a reprint of the
letterpress would be regarded by many as a thing
of price. One may hope that, some day, such
will be forthcoming.

LEIGH HUNT :

THE MAN AND THE WRITER
(1886)

AT a time when a biographer is found for almost
every man who becomes known in any degree to
the world at large, it is strange that we should
have no adequate record of the life of Leigh
Hunt, and specially strange that^no place should
have been found for him in that very Catholic
series of volumes devoted exclusively to l English
Men of Letters.' True, Hunt was less eminent
than some who are there commemorated : he
cannot, for example, be fitly placed by the side
of Chaucer and Milton, Bunyan and Burke; but
there are others among whom he might sit as
among his peers, and there is, perhaps, not one
in Mr Morley's gallery of worthies who can be
more accurately defined as a' man of letters pure
and simple. He was not, like Gibbon or Words-
worth or Dickens, pre-eminent in any one

94 LEIGH HUNT

province of the republic of letters, but he was a
free citizen of the whole domain. Loving litera-
ture with a passionate ardour, the work of his
life was an expression of his love ; and he is best
described by a vague but large phrase of his
friend Carlyle as a ' writer of books.'

Though a formal biography is wanting, a
fairly satisfactory record of the really productive
years in the life of Leigh Hunt is to be found in
the Autobiography and in the two volumes
of Correspondence, edited by his son ; the former
being one of the most fascinating personal narra-
tives to be found anywhere, and the latter
a singularly attractive contribution to what
may be described as postal literature. James
Henry Leigh Hunt — the first two Christian
names were dropped early in life — was born at
what was then the little village of Southgate,
Middlesex, on the ipth of October, 1784. His
father was a Creole, being of European race, but
of West Indian birth. Beginning life as a
lawyer, he forsook law for divinity, and, after
his emigration from Barbadoes to England,
became a popular metropolitan preacher, but in
his later years adopted Unitarian and Univer-
salist opinions. His mother, an American of
English descent, had Quaker blood in her veins ;

LEIGH HUNT 95

and those who love to note the phenomena of
heredity will find in Leigh Hunt very note-
worthy l strains ' both of the paternal and the
maternal stock. His father had what may be
called a tropical temperament — eager, sanguine,
pleasure -loving, careless ; and from him his son
doubtless inherited the bright cheerfulness, the
healthy optimism, and the lack of ordinary
practicality by which he was always distin-
guished ; while there is as little doubt that he de-
rived from his mother that dainty refinement and
exquisiteness of discrimination, both in matters
of art and of conduct, which gives a peculiarly
winning charm at once to his life and to his
work. To both parents he probably owed
something of that genial enthusiasm of humanity
which informs every line that came from his
pen, and which found its most memorable and
perfect expression in the little poem entitled
* Abou Ben Adhem.'

Hunt's was a childhood full of the quick
terrors and the vitalising delights which are the
dower of an actively procreant imagination and
a singularly sensitive physical and intellectual
organism. He was sent to school to Christ
Hospital — commonly, and, as he assures us,
erroneously known as Christ's Hospital — and

96 LEIGH HUNT

the long chapter in the Autobiography which is
devoted to his school-days is, as a piece of de-
lightful gossip, unexcelled by any of the more
eventful chapters by which it was followed.
Hunt describes himself with obvious truthful-
ness as an ( ultra-sympathising and timid boy,'
but his timidity was evidently that which comes
of quick sensitiveness rather than of what we
ordinarily understand as cowardice; indeed, it is
clear that where occasion called he was deficient
neither in physical nor moral courage. In one
sense of the word Hunt may be spoken of as a
precocious boy — that is, if the epithet can be
applied to taste as well as to talent. He revelled
in such literature as came in his way, which
seems to have been principally the poetry of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and what
he admired he imitated, writing * odes ' because
Collins and Gray had written them, ' pastorals '
because Pope had written them, ( blank verse'
because Akenside and Thomson had written
blank verse, and a * Palace of Pleasure ' because
Spenser had written a 'Bower of Bliss.' The
elder Hunt, who was proud of his boy's gift,
purely imitative as it was, collected these verses
and had them published by subscription in 1801,
the volume being adorned with an engraved

LEIGH HUNT 97

portrait of its juvenile author, who thus in his
eighteenth year had the proud satisfaction of
feeling himself a full-blown man of letters. Of
course he still continued to write, but a casual
occurrence turned his attention from verse to
prose. He was presented by his father with a
•set of the * British Classics/ and, becoming at
once enamoured of the art of essay writing, con-
tributed to the Traveller, an evening journal of
the period, a number of papers which were
accepted with effusion; though the writer had to
be content, and, as a matter of fact, was more
than content, with a very unsubstantial return
in the form of five or six copies of the issues in
which his lucubrations appeared. Other and
somewhat more profitable journalistic work
followed : in 1807 — that is when he was twenty-
three years of age — we find him contributing
theatrical criticisms to the Times, and in 1808
his brother John and himself established a
weekly paper, the Examiner, by which he was
destined to win what his friends called fame, his
enemies notoriety. This was not the first ex-
periment in journalism made by the two
brothers, for in 1805 they set up a little paper
sailed the News> which had but a short life
:and little influence; though Leigh Hunt's own

G

98 LEIGH HUNT

articles on matters theatrical attracted attention
by their novel independence of tone, it having
been the practice of pressmen, up to this date,
to accept ' orders ' as payment in full for indis-
criminate puffery. Drawn by the current of
circumstance rather than inclination, Leigh
Hunt soon found himself in the whirlpool of
controversies far more tumultuous than those
earlier ones concerning the merits of this actor
or that play. Hunt says of the Examiner, ' It
began by being of no party; but Reform soon
gave it one. It disclaimed all knowledge of
statistics; and the rest of its politics were rather
a sentiment and a matter of general training
than founded on any particular political reflec-
tion.' As a matter of fact, nascitur non Jit is as
true of the politician as of the poet; and it was
one of the oddest of the ironies of fate that a
man who was absolutely devoid of native bent
towards politics, and to whom one Spenser or
Petrarch was of more consequence than a score
of Broughams or Burdetts, should be known
earliest and longest, not as a gentle flower-
gatherer on the slopes of Parnassus, but as the
fiery irreconcilable who had been sent to prison
for libelling a prince.

In Hunt's private life at this time the most

LEIGH HUNT 99

important event was his marriage in July 1809
to Miss Marianne Kent, a young lady to whom
he had been engaged since his very early youth ;
so that, roughly speaking, his life of quiet
domesticity and of very unquiet publicity
may be said to have begun together. As for
the Examiner, it was soon in stormy waters.
Having, as Hunt describes, drifted into an
alliance with the party of Reform, its fealty
knew no half-heartedness ; and the legal func-
tionaries of a Tory Government soon found
that a new and formidable antagonist was
in the field, and aimed their artillery in his
direction. Several attempted prosecutions were
more or less ineffective; but at last Hunt gave
the enemy an opportunity of which advantage
was promptly taken. That never heroic or
admirable person, George, Prince of Wales,
had become George, Prince Regent; and the
popularity which had been his when he was
supposed to be the advocate for popular reform
measures, and especially for concession to the
Catholic claims, had not only vanished, but had
been replaced by an aggressive unpopularity
which expressed itself with no reticence or shy-
ness. On St Patrick's Day, 1812, there was
held the annual banquet of Irishmen resident in

ioo LEIGH HUNT

London, and the name of the Prince, which
had at previous similar gatherings been received
with rapture, was greeted first with significant
silence and then with still more significant hisses.
The occurrence could not well be ignored by the
Ministerial party, and its organ, the Morning
Post, endeavoured to compensate its royal patron
for the annoying incident by a leading article so
crammed with ludicrously misapplied compli-
ment that, if the Prince had possessed a keen
sense of humour, he would have felt that the
eulogies of his journalistic friend were harder to
bear than the hisses of his convivial foes. To
this article the Examiner replied; and a few
sentences from this reply — which was written
by Hunt himself — serve to show something of
the rather crude manner in which newspaper
flattery was administered, land newspaper con-
troversy conducted in those blithe days of the
Regency. The writer is nearing the close of his
article, and has evidently warmed to his subject.
He asks :—

' What person unacquainted with the true
state of the case could imagine that this " Glory
of the people1' was the subject of millions of
shrugs and reproaches ! — that this " Protector of
the Arts " had named a wretched foreigner his

LEIGH HUNT IOI

historical painter, in disparagement or in ig-
norance of the merits of his own country-
men!— that this " Maecenas of the age" had
not patronised a single deserving writer! — that
this " Breather of eloquence " could not say
a few decent extempore words, if we are to
judge, at least, from what he said to his re-
giment on its embarkation for Portugal ! —
that this "Conqueror of hearts" was the dis-
appointer of hopes ! — that this " Exciter of
desire " [bravo ! Messieurs of the Post] — this
" Adonis in loveliness " was a corpulent man of
fifty ! — in short, this delightful, blissful, wise,
honourable, virtuous, true and immortal prince
was a violater of his word, a libertine over head
and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties,
the companion of gamblers and demireps, a
man who has just closed half a century without
one single claim on the gratitude of his country
or the respect of posterity ! These are . hard
truths; but are they not truths ? And have we
not suffered enough — are we not now suffering
bitterly — from the disgusting flatteries of which
the above is a repetition? The Ministers may
talk of the shocking boldness of the press, and
may throw out their wretched warnings about
interviews between Mr Percival and Sir Vicary

102 LEIGH HUNT

Gibbs; but let us inform them that such vices
as have just been enumerated are shocking to all
Englishmen who have a just sense of the state
of Europe; and that he is a bolder man who,
in times like the present, dares to afford reason
for the description. Would to God that the
Examiner could ascertain that difficult, and per-
haps indiscoverable point which enables a public
writer to keep clear of an appearance of the
love of scandal, while he is hunting out the
vices of those in power.'

It may reasonably be inferred that such an
article would be the subject of more than one of
those interviews between Mr Percival and Sir
Vicary Gibbs. The result of the interviews was
a prosecution, and the result of the prosecution
was that the brothers Hunt were sentenced to
undergo two years' imprisonment in separate
gaols and to pay a fine of a thousand pounds.
They had previously been informed in a quiet,
but evidently authoritative manner, that if they
would take a pledge of total abstinence from
attacks on the Regent means should be found to
remit both fine and imprisonment ; but the
compromise was rejected, and Leigh Hunt was
conveyed to Surrey Gaol, while John was
immured in Clerkenwell. To no man of sensi-

LEIGH HUNT IO3

tive physical, and emotional organisation can
the closing behind him of a prison door be
anything but a shock, and to Leigh Hunt it was
specially trying, for he was at the time in feeble
health. His was, however, a spirit of brave
invincible cheerfulness; and most even of those
who know little else about him have heard the
story of how he had the walls of his room
papered with a trellis of roses, the ceiling
covered with clouds and sky, the barred windows
screened with Venetian blinds, while for com-
panionship he provided himself with his books,
his busts, his pianoforte, and — it need hardly be
added — unfailing relays of flowers. Modern
sestheticism would, perhaps, consider the ar-
rangement a little flamboyant, but there was
something about it which corresponded to a
certain expansive, dainty, luxuriousness in the
nature of the arranger ; and even people who
write these little manuals on * Art in the House/
which make some of us feel such terrible Phil-
istines, are unanimous in insisting on the
necessity of this very correspondence between
man and his dwelling-place. The cell, thus
transformed into a bower, was a surprise and
delight to troops of friends, for the prisoner was
not debarred from other society than his books

104 LEIGH HUNT

and flowers. He had much of the companion-
ship of his wife and children; and, besides his
old friends, he was visited by new ones drawn to
him by political or literary sympathies. Among
his many prison guests were Brougham, Byron,
Hazlitt, Charles and Mary Lamb, Mr and Mrs
Cowden Clarke ; and here, too, he made the
supreme but too brief friendship of his life, for
one of his visitors was Percy Bysshe Shelley.
This beloved name was now added to a list of
literary intimates of whom any man might well
be proud — a list which, in addition to the names
just mentioned already, included those of Thomas
Campbell, James and Horace Smith, Theodore
Hook, and others, and in which the still more
memorable names of Keats and Coleridge were
soon to be enrolled. Indeed, even these early
years of Leigh Hunt's career were so rich in all
the interest that attaches to poetry, art, literary
converse, and all such gracious sweeteners and
adorners of life that we are almost tempted to
resent the rough intrusion of these turbulent
political polemics which seem to be, and, in a
measure really were, alien elements. And yet,
if one considers it again, it is impossible to wish
that Hunt's life had been other than what it
was. The friends who have spoken in his praise

LEIGH HUNT IO5

— and is not their name legion ? — have dwelt
first and last and most lovingly upon those
genialities and graces and sweetnesses which
give to character its charm; it is worth much
to those of us who admire Hunt as warmly as
we love him, to know that he was in no wise
deficient in those less fascinating, but more
essentially virile qualities, which give to char-
acter structure, organism, power of influence,
and power of resistance. It is, as Goethe has
somewhere said, a weakness to be devoid of
capacity for noble indignation. Hunt had the
capacity, and he had also the courage and forti-
tude to make it effectual.

It is nevertheless pleasant to have the op-
portunity provided by this period of enforced
leisure in Hunt's life to note the work of this
period which was more truly representative of
his inner individuality than was the most sincere
and eager attack upon corruption in high places.
At the time of his imprisonment he had pub-
lished a lively volume of essays on the principal
London actors ; he had edited five volumes of
' Classic Tales,' and written various essays by
which they were accompanied ; and had more-
over contributed numerous other essays to the
Reflector, a very miscellaneous collection of

l° LEIGH HUNT

such compositions of which he was the editor.
While in prison he published ' The Descent of
Liberty; a Mask,' the subject of which was the
downfall of Napoleon ; and shortly after his
release appeared, with a dedication to Lord
Byron, his first really important work in verse,
'The Story of Rimini,' concerning which later
on a word or two must be said.

The friendship of Shelley was now the pleas-
antest element in the life of Leigh Hunt, and
after his emancipation from Surrey gaol, the
only noticeably unpleasant elements were pro-
vided by his occasional ill-health and his almost
constant pecuniary anxieties. Of these anxieties
it is only necessary to say that they were caused
partly by the drain upon his purse, which
necessarily resulted from the Government pro-
secution; partly by his own want of business
capabilities, which he repeatedly acknowledges
and deplores almost as if it were a crime; and
partly by a fact, in no way discreditable to
Hunt himself, which was, and is, well-known
to many of his friends, but which cannot be
touched upon, save in this allusive fashion with-
out inflicting undeserved pain upon innocent
living persons. The correspondence of this
period is rich in most delightful letters from

LEIGH HUNT I°7

Hunt to Shelley, from Shelley to Hunt, and
from the two wives, each to each, the four falling
quickly into an easy, intimate, brotherly and
sisterly fashion of converse. Of Shelley, Hunt
was not merely friend, but champion; for the
author of the revolutionary Queen Mob was
running the gauntlet of criticism, the ferocity
of which was intensified by both political and
theological hostility; and the Examiner was not
merely staunch in defence, but enthusiastic in
•eulogy. In Keats, Hunt found another friend
in need of a defender, and the defence was not
lacking either vigour or constancy. So far as
the general reading public are concerned, Hunt
was the discoverer of Keats, and not only his
discoverer, but his faithful interpreter, pointing
out lovingly, by means of his * sign-post criti-
cism/ (as it has been called somewhat dispar-
agingly by those who profess to need no
guidance along the byways of literature), those
magical facilities of insight and expression which
•even in his earliest and crudest work testified
that here was a poet of the true royal line. The
loyalty of the elder singer to his younger but
.greater competitor — for it cannot be pretended
that any of Hunt's work in poetry can rank
with the ' large utterance ' of Hyperion — is

108 LEIGH HUNT

very beautiful; and it must be regretted that
Lord Houghton, in his memoir of Keats, gave
permanence to the petulant complaining, en-
gendered by the morbidity of mortal disease,
in which Keats at one time indulged. To these
complainings Hunt in the Autobiography makes
a reply, needless to those who are familiar with
the files of the Examiner, but in itself so affect-
ing and persuasive in its restrained pathos of
remonstrance, that I quote a few sentences.
Hunt writes :

' I learned the other day, with extreme pain,
. . . that Keats at one period of his intercourse
with us suspected both Shelley and myself
of a wish to see him undervalued! Such are
the tricks which constant infelicity can play
with the most noble natures. For Shelley let
Adonais answer. For myself, let every word
answer that I; uttered about him, living and
dead, and such as I now proceed to repeat. I
might have been as well told that I wished to
see the flowers or the stars undervalued, or my
own heart that loved him. . . . Keats appears
to have been of opinion that I ought to have
taken more notice of what the critics said
against him. And perhaps I ought. My no-
tices of them may not have been sufficient. I

LEIGH HUNT i°9

may have too much contented myself with
panegyrising his genius, and thinking the ob-
jections to it of no ultimate importance. Had
he given me a hint to another effect I should
have acted upon it. But, in truth, as I have
before intimated, I did not see a twentieth part
of what was said against us, nor had I the
slightest notion, at that period, that he took
criticism so much to heart. I was in the habit,
though a public man, of living in a world of
abstractions of my own; and I regarded him as
of a nature still more abstracted and sure of
renown. . . I little suspected, as I did after-
wards, that the hunters had struck him; and
never at any time did I suspect that he could
have imagined it desired by his friends. Let
me quit the subject of so afflicting a delusion.'

It might be quitted here also, were it not well
to take a moment's notice of a reiteration and
elaboration of Keats' complaint made by Mr
Hall Caine in his ' Cobwebs of Criticism.' Mr
Caine adheres to the view which the dying poet
in his saner hours repudiated, and asks scorn-
fully what Leigh Hunt did for Keats. A more
extraordinary question has seldom been put.
What rather, it should be asked, did Hunt not
do, except reply to criticisms of the very exist-

ii° LEIGH HUNT

ence of which he was ignorant ? From the close
of 1816, when Keats, who was then entirely
unknown, was introduced by Hunt to the read-
ing public, to the day of his untimely taking off,
the pages of the Examiner and the Indicator
are rich in the warmest tributes to his genius,
and it is noteworthy that in 1818, which wit-
nessed the appearance of the notorious review
in the Quarterly, and which Mr Caine specially
notes as the year of Hunt's silence, Hunt pub-
lished, in the little volume of verse entitled
' Foliage,' three sonnets addressed to Keats, in
which his genius is celebrated in phrases which
may almost be described as those of affectionate
hyperbole.

This friendship, however, loyal and enthu-
siastic as it was, had but a brief continuance.
Poor Keats bade farewell to all his friends but
one, and set out on his journey southward and
sunward, in search of the health that might
bring with it new visions of beauty, to find
only the one solemn vision of the beyond.
Shelley also found his way to Italy and to
death; but in his case the end was not yet, and
before it came Hunt and he were destined to
meet on the shores of a land dear to both. This
Italian visit of Hunt's was but an episode in

LEIGH HUNT m

his life, which might be very briefly dismissed
were % it not that in some of its occurrences
Hunt's calumniators have found material for
their most malignant attacks ; and therefore
in Hunt's vindication a somewhat full statement
of the facts is necessary. In the beginning of
the year 1821, not only Shelley, but Lord
Byron, who had been driven from England by
the voice of public opinion, was making for
himself a temporary home in Italy; and the
two poets were brought into tolerably close
companionship. Byron was determined that
though condemned to exile he would not be
condemned to silence, and he confided to Shelley
a scheme for the establishment of a periodical
publication through which his voice might still
be heard. The result of the talks between the
two friends was a letter addressed by Shelley
to Hunt, dated August 26, in which Hunt was
invited to come over to Italy to assist in the
production of the new venture, and to be an
equal sharer in the profits with Lord Byron, as.
Shelley himself, though promising co-operation,
refused to accept any portion of the gains.
Hunt was naturally tempted by the offer. The
fortunes of the Examiner were languishing;
the health of its editor was in a most precarious,.

\'.t

112 LEIGH HUNT

condition; Italy; was dear to Hunt, as the land
of poetry and romance; and dearer still was
the friend to whose side he had been sum-
moned. Monetary difficulties were really the
only obstacle, but by Shelley's assistance they
were removed, and Hunt and his family set sail
for the South. After a voyage full of delays and
dangers the voyagers reached their destination,
landing at Leghorn early in the July of 1822.
Here they were joined by Shelley, and in a
few days removed to Pisa, where rooms had
been provided for the Hunts, in a palazzo
rented by Lord Byron. The two friends were
delighted to be again in each other's society,
and both looked forward to a period of long
and happy companionship. The hope was
vain, for the mutual greetings had hardly been
exchanged when Shelley bade the little circle
at Pisa what turned out to be his last farewell,
and started on the fatal voyage from which
he came back no more. [This terrible cata-
strophe, which robbed Hunt of his best friend,
and the world of one of its truest poets, had
also the effect of bringing Hunt into an unfair
and wholly unexpected relation of dependence
upon Lord Byron. Byron's enthusiasm in the
^natter of the Liberal, the name which had

LEIGH HUNT 113

been proposed for the new magazine, had begun
to cool; but instead of acquainting Hunt with
this fact, he adopted a policy of simple pro-
crastination; and Hunt, who had come out,
relying upon assurances that the work would
be commenced at once, was condemned not
only to enforced indolence, but to the humilia-
tion of having to ask for aid, which, by no
fault of his own, was unearned, and which
when asked for, was doled out grudgingly and
contemptuously, as it might have been to a
too importunate mendicant. Byron found Hunt
uncongenial; Mrs Hunt he positively detested;
and the children irritated him, though he
seems to have condescended to an endeavour
to corrupt the morals of one of the boys. His
letters to friends in England were full of ex-
pressions of dissatisfaction with his own scheme,
and of complaints against Hunt, buttressed by
the lying statement that he had only engaged
in the undertaking, because Hunt and his
brother had pressed him to do so. Eventually,
the first number of the Liberal appeared, and
it was followed by three others, though it was
clear from the first that it lacked the kind
of vitality which is essential to permanence.
Certainly it contained The Vision of Judgment,

"4 LEIGH HUNT

that greatest satirical effort of a writer who was
greater in satire than in anything else, and it
contained also Shelley's translation of the Wai-
pur gis Nacht from Faust^ and some of Hazlitt's
most vigorous essays ; but it had no obvious
unity of purpose which would make any special
class of readers eager to welcome it, and when,
after the publication of the fourth number,
Byron withdrew; in disgust, the fatal blow only
antedated an inevitable and early natural decease.
Hunt's own articles were quantitatively the
most important part of the contents, and they
were bright, graceful, and eminently character-
istic ; but they certainly had not body and
weight enough to supply the intellectual mo-
mentum required for a literary projectile which
was intended to accomplish such great things in
the battering down of strongholds. The Liberal
died, as it was bound to die ; and Hunt and
Byron parted for ever, the former travelling
westward to life in England, the other eastward
to death in Greece. After Byron's death, Hunt
published a work entitled Recollections of Lord
Byron and some of his Contemporaries, in
which he told the story of his relations with his
noble brother poet — truthfully it need hardly be
said, but not unnaturally with some touches of

LEIGH HUNT H5

bitterness. Byron's friends were, as naturally,
enraged, and retaliated, I was about to say in
kind ; but the phrase is hardly appropriate to
describe a retaliation in which unpleasant truths
are met by still more unpleasant falsehoods.
These and other falsehoods have been adopted
without any serious question by Lord Byron's
latest biographers, Professor Nichol and Mr
Cordy Jeaffreson, and one of them, which is at
once the most injurious and the most recently
invented, has even found its way into Mr Leslie
Stephen's otherwise trustworthy article on Lord
Byron in the Dictionary of National Biography.
Hunt was accused, in the first place, of flagrant
ingratitude to a man who had been his lavish
benefactor, and whose only offence was that he
had resisted Hunt's importunities when they
became too frequent and eager to be longer
borne. To this charge even the very brief
statement of facts that has been given is a
sufficient reply, and Hunt was able to dispose of
it triumphantly by publishing in the Morning
Chronicle a letter in which he proved that, so far
from Byron having been generous, he had not
even been just; that instead of loading Hunt
with favours, he had not even fulfilled his
pledged obligations. To other charges Hunt

116 LEIGH HUNT

could not reply, for the sufficing reason that
they have only been formulated since his death.
It has been asserted that the commoner pcet
had disgusted the lordly one by assumptions of
undue familiarity, the necessary implication
being that the Recollections were prompted by
wounded vanity. Professor Nichol, for example,
tells us that ' Hunt could never recognise the
propriety of the claim to deference which the
" noble poet " was always too eager to assert,
and was inclined to take liberties which his
patron perhaps too superciliously repelled.'
This statement sounds plausible, but it has the
one defect of being inconsistent with facts which
compel us to acquit Hunt of presumption and
Byron of superciliousness. It has been more
than once remarked that while Byron had an
intense and prideful consciousness of his rank,
he was anxious to be thought superior to
such a weakness; and Hunt annoyed him not
by taking liberties, but by the diametrically
opposite offence of constantly shewing his re-
membrance of the social gulf which separated
the journalist from the peer. In the early days
of their friendship the formalities of ceremonial
intercourse had been dropped on both sides,
and, after the manner of intimates, they had

LEIGH HUNT "7

addressed each other as * Byron ' and * Hunt/
Events had sundered them for a time, and
when, on Hunt's arrival in Italy, the intercourse
was renewed, his increased knowledge of the
world, and probably an instinctive perception of
Lord Byron's weakness, prompted him to con-
form to habits of action and of speech which
acknowledged decorously but not effusively the
claims of rank. His lordship recognised the
change, and visibly chafed under it, expressing
his annoyance in a half-serious, half-humorous
manner, by beginning a letter to Hunt with
the words * Dear Lord Hunt ' — a piece of harm-
less banter at which the recipient of the letter
laughed so heartily and good-naturedly that he
compelled the writer not only to join in his
merriment but to leave him to act upon his
own notions of etiquette unrestrained by further
protests.

Apologies may be due for saying so much,
or indeed for saying anything of what may seem
a trifle; but it is not a trifle when a man of the
severest delicacy and refinement of nature is
accused by a responsible writer of one of the
vulgarest forms of assumption. Still more
brutal — it could not well be more baseless — is
the accusation made by Mr Cordy JeafFreson,

" LEIGH HUNT

and unfortunately accepted to some extent by
Mr Leslie Stephen. Put in its briefest form
the accusation is this — that when Hunt went
out to Italy there was a distinct understanding
that he should continue to edit the Examiner,
so as to insure the support of that journal for
the new magazine, and that therefore in aban-
doning his post he was guilty of a scandalous
and unscrupulous breach of faith. It will hardly
be believed that the only foundation for this
monstrous charge is a casual statement by Tre-
lawny that Lord Byron's loss of interest in the
Liberal was largely the result of his discovery
that Hunt on leaving England had severed his
connection with the Examiner; and even this
statement, which has been so shamefully ela-
borated, is clearly incorrect — not that Trelawny
wilfully misrepresented the facts, but that his
information was imperfect or his memory defec-
tive. Byron, in his letters to friends in England,
had much to say about the Hunts, and made the
most of all kinds of trivial or imaginary griev-
ances : it is simply incredible that had a griev-
ance of such reality and magnitude as this really
existed he would have refrained from men-
tioning it. He does, however, so refrain, and
for most people of common-sense this fact would

LEIGH HUNT "9

be enough; for it is clear that if Byron had
shown that there was even primd facie ground
for such a charge against Hunt it would have
been a complete justification of himself. But
Byron's letters provide positive as well as nega-
tive testimony to the absurdity of the calumny.
In a letter written in September, 1822, when
Hunt had been some months in Italy, he dis-
tinctly says, ' I believe the brothers Hunt to be
honest men'; and during the following month
he writes, 'As to any community of thought,
feeling or opinion between Leigh Hunt and me,
there is little or none. We meet rarely, hardly
ever, but / think him a good-principled and able
man, and must do as I would be done by.' It is
surely needless to point out that Lord Byron
would not have spoken of Hunt as 'honest'
and 'good-principled' had he himself been the
recent victim of a breach of faith such as that
which we owe to the fertile imagination of Mr
Cordy Jeaffreson. After such conclusive evi-
dence, it is work of supererogation to add that
in the letters of Shelley arranging for Hunt's
visit to Italy there is no hint of the alleged
misunderstanding, or to suggest the obvious
absurdity of the idea that in the year 1822 a
weekly newspaper in London could be con-

120 LEIGH HUNT

ducted successfully, or at all, by an editor in
Pisa or Genoa.

But enough of this. Such a discussion is
always irritating, and it is a scandal to literature
that it should ever be necessary. It is pleasant
to leave these wrangles for a necessarily brief
glance at Hunt's laborious, anxious, but always
brave and cheerful life in England. In events,
other than personal and domestic ones, it was
poor; in work, in love, and in honour it was
rich indeed. He had his share of quiet home
joys; he had, perhaps, more than his share of
home sorrows; but for due account of these
we must needs refer readers to .the Autobio-
graphy and the Correspondence. Since the
severance of his connection with the Examiner
he had left the readers of the political world
to wander at their own sweet, or bitter, will.
This retirement from the arena of political
strife to the flowery meads of literature, where
Whigs and Tories can lie down together, did
much to bring to an end literary animosities
which had their origin in party antagonism;
and Christopher North, who had been one of
Hunt's fiercest assailants, confessed that by the
mere force of genius and geniality, the ' Cockney
poet ' had triumphed. ( The animosities,' he

LEIGH HUNT *2i

exclaimed, with that impulsive generosity of
his, 'are mortal, but the humanities live for
ever,' and then went on to indulge in a fine
panegyric upon Leigh Hunfs London Journal,
which he declared lay weekly upon his breakfast
table, ' like a spot of sunshine dazzling the
snow.'

The greater part of the work of these later
years consisted of criticism — that special kind
of criticism of which Hunt was one of the
first and best masters, and which is not an
application of rigidly defined canons, but rather
a spontaneous expression of appreciation for
those things which appealed to a sense of beauty
at once delicate and catholic. This criticism
often took the form of brief papers, sometimes
of more elaborate productions, such as The
Book of the Sonnet and A Jar of Honey from
Mount Hybla; and while celebrating the poets
whom he loved, his own muse was not forsaken,
for much of his most graceful and winning
verse sprang into being during these years of
toil. Then, too, there were such pleasant books
of historical and topographical gossip as The
Town and The Old Court Siiburb, to say
nothing of other attempts and achievements
' that weighed not as his work yet swelled the

J22 LEIGH HUNT

man's amount.' Of the quality of all that was
done in these crowded years I must say a word
or two before I close : its mere quantity may
well be a theme for wondering remark; and
when we remember that it was work produced
by one whose health was never strong, and who
was pressed down by pecuniary and domestic
anxieties, it is impossible to regard without
admiration that warms into affection, such un-
remitting industry, such quiet courage, such
heroic serenity and cheerfulness.

Y^hen the end came it found Hunt in harness.
He had gone to visit a relative at Putney, not
far from his humble but pleasant Hammersmith
home, and had taken with him the materials for
work. His work, however, was done, and on the
28th of August, 1859, he received the call to rest,
which he obeyed with that quiet, contented faith,
that simple natural piety, which had sustained
him through the troubles of a more than ordin-
arily troubled life. With him passed away not
only a typical man of letters, to whom every
lover of literature must award the tribute of an
ungrudging admiration, but a brave, gentle and
loyal spirit, whose memory must be peculiarly
dear to those who are touched and won by
things lovely and of good report. To most of

LEIGH HUNT 123

that which constituted the grace and beauty of
Hunt's character scant justice has been done in
the preceding pages, for the simple reason that
a dismal necessity has largely filled them with
answers to the miserable calumnies by which he
has been assailed. The mere existence of those
calumnies places an appreciator of Hunt at an
unfair disadvantage, for when a man is made the
object of persistent attack on the part of those
who seem disinterested critics the uninformed
* reading public ' is apt to think that the attacks
must at any rate have some justification. It is
high time, both in the interests of humanity and
literature, to show that in Hunt's case at least
there was no justification, and this is a tardy
attempt to perform with unsatisfactory brevity
a task which ought to have been performed long
ago.

Curiously enough, the blow which has, per-
haps, been most damaging to Hunt's fair fame
was dealt unwittingly by the hand of a friend
who loved and honoured him. In an unfor-
tunate hour Charles Dickens conceived the
idea of giving a bright life-likeness to one of
his most despicable creations by investing him
with a certain atmosphere of gay sentiment, and
by attributing to him certain tricks of manner

*24 LEIGH HUNT

which were generally recognised as Hunt's; the
not unnatural consequence being that the real
Hunt was proclaimed to be the original — in
morals as well as in manner — of the imaginary
Harold Skimpole. It is true that as soon as this
miserable * canard ' reached the ears of Charles
Dickens he published in Household Words an
earnest, unreserved and almost tearful repudia-
tion ; but the mischief had been done, for
thousands had read the novel and heard the
story who knew nothing of the writer's just and
generous vindication of his dead friend. Even a
writer to whom reference has already been made,
and to whom the fact can hardly be unknown,
has dared to apply the name of Skimpole to the
man whom the creator of Skimpole regarded
with the warmest affection and the profoundest
respect.

But Charles Dickens was only a single mem-
ber of a veritable troop of friends; his voice
was only one among many raised to do honour
in life and in death to this fine, gentle spirit,
Mr Ireland — himself one of the truest of Hunt's
friends — has collected a number of these tributes
to Hunt's character and genius, and among
the tributaries we find names such as those of
Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose beautiful descrip-

LEIGH HUNT 125

tion of Leigh Hunt in his old age we all re-
member; Edmund Oilier, Lord Macaulay, Wil-
liam Hazlitt, Judge Talfourd, R. H. Home (the
author of ' Orion '), Miss Mitford, John Forster,
and Mr James Russell Lowell, who vie with
each other in doing homage to the man and the
writer. To these may be added the loyal and
generous reference of Charles Lamb in his
memorable letter to Southey, one of the most
simple and touching passages even in the writ-
ings of ' Elia,' which are so full of such. One
other he does add, and it is perhaps the
weightiest; for its writer was not, as we know
too well, given to words of genial praise. When
Hunt's pecuniary anxieties had reached a climax,
and an attempt — which proved successful — was
being made to secure him a pension of ^"200 a
year from the funds of the Civil List, Thomas
Carlyle wrote certain * Memoranda concerning
Mr Leigh Hunt/ from which may be tran-
scribed a few decisive sentences :

( That Mr Leigh Hunt is a man of most in-
disputably superior worth; a man of genius in
a very strict sense of that word, and in all the
senses which it bears or implies; 'of brilliant
varied gifts, of clearness, lovingness, truthful-
ness; of child-like open character; also of most

126 LEIGH HUNT

pure, and even exemplary, private deportment; a
man who can be other than loved only by those
who have not seen him, or seen him from a
distance through a false medium.

'That he is heavily laden with domestic
burdens, more heavily than most men, and his
economical resources are gone from him. For
the last twelve years he has toiled continually,
with passionate diligence, with the cheerfullest
spirit, refusing no task; yet hardly able, with all
this, to provide for the day that was passing
over him; and now, after some two years of in-
cessant effort in a new enterprise that seemed of
good promise, it also has suddenly broken down ;
and he remains in weak health, age creeping on
him, without employment, means, or outlook, in
a situation of the painfullest sort. Neither do
his distresses, nor did they at any time, arise
from wastefulness or the like, on his own part
(he is a man of humble wishes, and can live
with dignity upon little); but from crosses of
what is called fortune, from injustice of other
men, from inexperience of his own, and a guile-
less trustfulness of nature : the thing and things
that have made him unsuccessful make him in

LEIGH HUNT 127

reality more loveable, and plead for him in the
minds of the candid.

* That such a man is rare in a nation, and of
high value there; not to be procured for a whole
nation's revenue, or recovered when taken from
us ; and some ^"200 a year is the price at which
this one, whom we now have, is valued at.'

When a man like Carlyle speaks from his
very heart he is a bold man who would dare to
speak after him. Indeed to some of us it is
difficult to speak of Leigh Hunt at all, save in
language which sets at defiance the ordinary
reticences of literature. There are writers who
inspire us with unbounded enthusiasm of mere
admiration, but who stir in us no intimate and
personal emotion ; there are others the very
mention of whose names evokes an answering
thrill of outgoing affection. It is to the latter
class that Leigh Hunt belongs; he is primarily,
and above all things, the friend of our heart, and
he has won his right to a place among our loved
ones, not by this or by that quality — by his utter
unworldliness, his quick sympathy, or by his dis-
interested enthusiasm — but by the victorious win-
ningness of his entire personality: he is dear,
not because he had one beautiful gift, or many
beautiful gifts, but because he was Leigh Hunt.

128 LEIGH HUNT

Of the many charms of Hunt's writings,
perhaps the most powerful is the personal
accent which brings the writer near to us. It
seems strange at first sight that we should feel
this with regard to a man whose work was so
largely critical, for the traditional view of criti-
cism is that it is something essentially abstract
and zmhuman — not to say z>zhuman — but the
very thing which makes Leigh Hunt a memor-
able worker in this field of literature is that
in his hands criticism became vascular and alive,
a thing of flesh and blood. Professor Dowden,
in a sentence which would have, in itself,
endeared him to Hunt, has said that l the best
criticism ... is not that which comes out of
profound cogitation, but out of immense en-
joyment; and the most valuable critic is the
critic who communicates sympathy by an ex-
quisite record of his own delights, not the
critic who attempts to communicate thought.'
This is a penetratively truthful utterance, but
long before the truth had been formulated by
Mr Dowden, it had been vindicated by the
practice of Leigh Hunt. His criticism was,
indeed, the outcome of an immense enjoyment,
and we feel that this enjoyment has been at
once the primary and the most powerful im-

LEIGH HUNT 129

pulse to expression. It is because he enjoys,
and because he expresses his enjoyment with
such naivete, that he almost compels us, by a
gracious compulsion, to enjoy with him; and
our debt to Hunt is the debt we owe to one
who has multiplied indefinitely our purest
and most super-sensuous delights, and, while
multiplying them, has given to each of them
a new and peculiar poignancy.

There are no doubt many portions of Hunt's
work which lack what one may call the classical
note. It was inevitable that it should be thus.
He often had to write hastily, under pressure
not of the spirit within but of the necessity
without; and even when the pressure was of
the true kind — the pressure of inspiration — this
very fact engendered a certain impulsive, un-
calculating eagerness of utterance hardly com-
patible with that nice perfectness of phrase
which Hunt valued so much in .others, but
which he may have felt in his heart might
be won at too great a sacrifice of something
better. We may smile — indeed many of us
have often smiled — at the utterly prosaic and
fatuous criticisms, by Mr Macvey Napier, of
Hunt's contributions to the Edinburgh Review;
but, as the common phrase has it, there was

13° LEIGH HUNT

* something in them/ by which we mean that
there was this in them — that Hunt's style would
at times be found irritating by one to whom
the mint, anise, and cummin of expression were
everything, the weightier matter of adequacy
nothing. For Hunt is adequate : he does say
what he had to say, not hint at it blunderingly ;
his rendering of his thought and emotion may
at times be careless, but it is always complete.

Still it is to be doubted whether it is as a
critic that Hunt would have best cared to be
remembered. Poetry was his first, his last, his
most constant love ; and if by prose he had to
win the meat and the raiment of life it was
poetry that to him was life itself. In one
respect — and sufficient note has hardly been
taken of it — Hunt's place is a singularly high
one, for he is among the originators. Readers
who have studied these poems of Hunt which
had been published before the appearance of
Endymion can hardly fail to recognise that to
him Keats owed much of what has often been
regarded as most distinctly his own; and a man
of whom it can be truly said that he influenced
Keats is a man of whom it can be said as truly
that he has influenced the whole course of
English poetry since Keats was laid in his Italian

LEIGH HUNT I31

grave. But, however this may be, those who
admire and love the poetry of Hunt need not be
afraid of allowing him to be judged by his own
achievement without thought of any such side
issue. Even among poets who are poets beyond
all doubt, we recognise some as specially poetical
poets, and Hunt is one of these. He is never
supreme in the way that some poets are supreme,
and even on his own level, he is at one time less
felicitous than at another; but there is one thing
in which he never fails — that imaginative glow
and warmth which takes us into another world
than the prosaic life of every day, and enables us
to forget the dulnesses and the meannesses of
the actual. Whatever else it may lack, his
work never lacks gusto — the sense and expres-
sion of quick keen delight in all things natur-
ally and wholesomely delightful. To us who
are familiar with the heated tones of some con-
temporary verse it may seem almost ludicrous
that such an instinctively stainless poem as i The
Story of Rimini ' should have been considered to
be in some way an offence against the ordered
proprieties of life ; but the fact is that Hunt had
a singular healthfulness, and therefore a singular
purity, which enabled him to handle worthily
and with a sweet wholesome simplicity of touch

I32 LEIGH HUNT

themes which in the hands of coarser or more
self-conscious men would inevitably catch some
glow of unwholesome voluptuousness or hint of
subtle pruriency. We know what the age of the
Regency was, and we can imagine how difficult
it was for the average man of the world in that
age to conceive the possibility of treating with
absolute purity — purity that was instinctive and
unconscious of itself — a subject which in any
way lent itself to grossness or suggestiveness of
expatiation. Hunt, however, though in the age
was not of it. The companions of his spirit
were Petrarch, Chaucer, Spenser ; and in the
Una of the last named poet who rode upon the
lion we have an imaginative type of the passion-
ately pure genius of Hunt. No most solicitous
mother of any carefully nurtured English girl
need look with even a momentary glance of
suspicion upon any line written by this stainless
soul; and the guarantee for her confidence is not
to be found in any of Hunt's opinions or convic-
tions, but in the fact that his nature was not one
in which anything but the sweet and the
innocent could live.

Hunt's mission among English poets was
to be a celebrator of the beauty and gladness
of nature and of human life, and to the Puritan

LEIGH HUNT 133

element, which has as yet hardly worn out of
the English character, beauty is a temptation
and gladness a snare. But this feeling is a
result of intellectual action — of considering too
curiously — and Hunt's was a nature framed for
fine emotion and keen sensation rather than
for ethical or other considering. He simply
turned instinctively to the sun in whatever
region of sky or home the sun might be, and
it is little wonder that the sunlight is reflected
in his verse. A sunny spirit — that is the true
name for Leigh Hunt. His sky indeed was
often clouded, but he waited cheerfully and
hopefully for the clouds to pass away; and when
now and then he touches some sad theme he
dwells most insistently, not upon the sadness
itself, but upon that element of beauty which
adheres in all sadness which is not ignoble. He
was a good man : he was also, in spite of
troubles which would have crushed the heart
out of most of us, a happy man; and it is
impossible for any spirit who has been * finely
touched* to be long in his company without
being consciously both better and happier. It
is difficult to leave him, but the parting must
come. Let it be brief. Beloved Leigh Hunt,
Ave atque vale !

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

CHARLES KINGSLEY, in one of his vigorous
essays, speaks mournfully of the time ' when
Pope and plain sense went out and Shelley and
the seventh heaven came in.' The tone of
complaint seems at the first blush somewhat
unreasonable, for the coming in of the seventh
heaven is surely a desirable event in a world
where even a heaven of lower rank is not al-
ways very easily discernible. Celestial qualities
either in life or in literature must needs be
valuable; but like more commonplace valuables,
they offer a strong temptation to counterfeiting
experts, and it is better to have in one's pocket
an honest brown penny than a pinchbeck sove-
reign. It can hardly be doubted by anybody
that a good deal of pinchbeck coin is at present
in circulation. Pope's bronze of plain sense
may be described in Kantian phraseology as the

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE *35

wisdom of the Understanding, born of common-
place observation and reflection; the celestial
auriferous-looking coinage now in greater favour,
is supposed to be the wisdom of that higher
reason which comes of direct vision — vision that
is free from the tiresome necessity of explaining
and justifying its own processes. But, as the
poet remarks, * things are not what they seem,'
— at least not always. Wilful and perverse
whimsicality is occasionally presented to us as
the precious harvest of insight, and the false
meaning or no meaning of this Brummagem
insight is judiciously veiled by a style to which,
because it is generally deficient in lucidity and
not infrequently in grammar, we award such
praise as is conveyed by one or other of the
fashionable terms of eulogy. It is a fact that
the expression of the highest truth — the truth
of Reason — may sometimes look like nonsense
when surveyed from the lower plane of the
Understanding; but the study of much contem-
porary literature, especially in the domains of
poetry and criticism, tends to convince the
student that in the creed of the modern young
man of letters the fact is stated conversely, thus :
* Whatever is apparently nonsense must be ac-
cepted as the highest truth.'

I36 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

Of course we are not left without writers who
can think clearly and strongly, and who can
clothe their thoughts in a well-fitting and grace-
ful vesture of language which renders adequately
its every outline; but it can hardly be said that
the work of these writers represents the mass of
our current literature in the same way that the
work of such men as Pope and Johnson repre-
sented the current literature of their century.
Pope and Johnson stood above the crowd in
virtue of qualities which were incommunicable;
but they and the crowd had a common standard
of excellence, and if this standard were not the
highest, it was at any rate better than no
standard at all. Correctness in following models
approved by a general agreement of cultivated
opinion may not be the noblest literary virtue;
but it is a virtue which betokens a state of intel-
lectual civilisation, because it is an acknowledg-
ment of a central authority; whereas, on the
other hand, the dethronement of what is under-
stood to be correctness in favour of a so-called
originality — the divine right to say anything
anyhow — is not an advance but a distinct retro-
gression, a lapse from civilisation into anarchy.

Kingsley, in making his point, had recourse
to ' apt alliteration's artful aid,' a rhetorical

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 137

expedient employed by other point-makers
before and since his time; but, in his epi-
grammatic utterance, sound which strikes, and
significance which satisfies, fit each other more
closely and neatly than usual. Shelley is really
the best representative of the poetry of a cloud-
wrapped, invisible, seventh heaven, the poetry
of * the desire of the moth for the star/ of an
attempt at the expression of the inexpressible,
the attainment of the unattainable. Pope is
not less truly a typical poet of plain sense,
content with the imaginative sustenance and
emotional stimulation of the familiar harvest
of earth's cornfields and vineyards, which yields
wholesome flour to his flail and wine to his
press. Wherever one opens his pages one
finds some final literary embodiment of what
has been described as the wisdom of the
Understanding; but a very just appreciation
of the kind and quality of his work as an
imaginative exponent of this wisdom may be
arrived at without straying beyond those two
very characteristic poems, the Essay on Man
and the Essay on Criticism,

One feels specially with regard to the former
poem what one so often feels with regard to
some real or supposed masterpiece of literature,

A3 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

— how interesting it would be to read for the
first time without having previously read one
of the many words written by the critics con-
cerning it. It has been urged by writers of
the rank of De Quincey, Mr Leslie Stephen,
and Mr Lowell, that its thought is borrowed
from Bolingbroke; that the philosophical system
expounded in it lacks unity, and that one
position is, indeed, inconsistent with another;
that it is illogical, shallow, ill-digested, and I
know not what besides. Now all these charges
are more or less true, and if but one of them
were true the Essay on Man would be deprived
of claims to honour as a systematic philosophical
statement. But this is just what it is not, —
just what it cannot be, unless it is to abandon
all right to be considered a poem. Pope's
poetry is the poetry of the Understanding; but
an orderly logical essay on Man, with all its
parts so well and calmly thought out in relation
to each other that there should be no incon-
sistency or flaw in the chain of reasoning, would
be the mere prose of the Understanding. We
are easily misled by names, and the essay being
a recognised prose form, we yield to the temp-
tation to judge by prose canons any composition
bearing that name. Perhaps there is no fact

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 139

which tells so much in favour of an affirmative
answer to the old question of the debating
societies, * Was Pope a poet ? ' than his obvious
inability to produce metrical work, which, when
judged by these canons, is at all satisfactory.
The Essay on Man is not an essay at all, in
so far as that term involves logical as well as
literary continuity; it is really a collection of
short reflective and epigrammatic poems, the
welding together of which into a larger poem, —
with an apparent rather than a real unity — is
mechanical, not vital. Thus, in the Essay on
Man the parts are greater than the whole; and
Pope, as represented by this and similar works,
is one of the few poets to whom no injustice,
but rather the fullest justice, is done by the
process of reproduction in what used to be
called Elegant Extracts.

Of the single lines which, in becoming po-
pular proverbial expressions, have received the
world's testimonial to their penetrating truth of
thought and final perfectness of expression it is
needless to speak, though it may be remarked
that their combination of compactness with
clearness is, broadly speaking, unknown to the
literature of our own day, and, if we may judge
from what we read, is not even regarded as a

140 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

desirable ideal. Of the longer detachable
passages which are, in a manner, complete in
themselves, and which I have ventured to speak
of as poems, it has been said again and again
that the thought in them is trite and obvious.
It would be foolhardy to affirm that this is never
the case; but, even when it is so, it must be re-
membered that the world owes a debt of grati-
tude not merely to "the man who provides what
are called new ideas, but to him who crystallises
old thought, with which in solution people have
long been familiar, into some enduring jewel of
language. There is always something admirable
and deserving in literature instinct with that
quality of which Pope wrote the memorable
couplet : —

1 True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed.'

It may, however, be questioned whether
Pope's intellectual substance is really so thin as
it is often assumed to be. The master of utter-
ance has the power of so presenting a new or
profound thought that we appropriate it at once,
and the appropriation is so effortless that we are
tempted to believe it has always been ours — that
because we see it so clearly now, we have always

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 14*

seen it with equal clearness. On the other
hand, the thought which we take home with
difficulty acquires a factitious value from the
labour spent in its acquisition, for it is not in
human nature to prize lightly what it has cost
so much to win. I would not even seem to
depreciate the noble work of Robert Browning ;
but I think any fair-minded admirer will admit
that an important element in his estimate of the
poet's thought is his consciousness that he has
made it his own by working for it, and that if he
had not worked for it, it could never have been
his.

And this mention of Browning tempts me to
note the fact that one of his most striking
central ideas was really anticipated, and antici-
pated not vaguely and tentatively but with
singular force and distinctness, by the poet with
whom he seems to have so little in common.
The idea as it appears in numerous poems of
Browning may be briefly stated thus : — Man is a
being created for two lives, a finite life and an
infinite life, and if he will live wisely he will
neither ignore the latter in the enjoyment of
the former, nor commit the opposite error of
attempting to snatch at the fulness of the
infinite life while yet subject to the bonds of the

142 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

finite — to 'crowd into time eternity's concern.'
This is the thought which pervades with
weighty warning such poems as Paracelsus,
Sordello, and Easter-Day — with stimulating
appeal such other poems as A Grammarian 's
Funeral and Rabbi Ben Ezra \ it is indeed one
of the most frequent of Browning's germinal
ideas, and is often referred to as something
peculiarly his own. He has, doubtless, largely
made it so by characteristic treatment; but in
another form, less impressive indeed but more
sharply outlined than the dramatic, it is cer-
tainly present in the Essay on Man. After an
argument which may be left to the tender
mercies of the logical critics, Pope arrives at the
conclusion that in the universe of being : —

1 'tis plain,

There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man :
And all the question (wrangle e'er so long)
Is only this, if God has placed him wrong ? '

To this question Pope's optimistic theism can
give but one reply, and it is in the course of
this reply — from which a few passages must be
quoted — that he unfolds the thought of man's
limitations and possibilities.

' Then say not Man's imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather, Man's as perfect as he ought :

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 143

His knowledge measured to his state and place,
His time a moment, and a point his space.
If to be perfect in a certain sphere,
What matter, soon or late, or here or there.

4 In Pride, in reas'ning Pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies ;
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods.

* The bliss of Man (could Pride that blessing find),
Is not to act or think beyond mankind;
No pow'rs of body or of soul to share,
But what his nature or his state can bear.'

It is needless to adduce parallels, but it will
be seen that the thought of Pope is really one
with the thought of Browning; and if its expres-
sion by the earlier poet seem less impressive
than that of our own contemporary, the com-
parative lack of impressiveness is to be found,
not in the thought itself, but in the form of
expression which has become to us old-fashioned,
flat, and destitute of its primal charm.

What Pope has to say concerning the relation
of passion to conduct is hardly less noteworthy.
The passions, uncontrolled by reason or con-
science, have forced so many men into folly, or
vice, or crime, that the first thought of the

144 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

average man is to regard them as necessarily
enemies of virtue, and the reasoning, restraining
faculties as necessarily its allies. This was cer-
tainly the ordinary view of the eighteenth cen-
tury, its moral ideal being the conception of a
man whose passions were always held in sub-
jection. It is, indeed, the ordinary view even
yet, and many a man and woman of to-day has
felt the delightful shock of a new and illumi-
nating truth in reading the words of Professor
Seeley — ' No heart is pure that is not passionate;
no virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic,' — or
those other words of Rabbi Ben Ezra,

' Let us not always say,
Spite of this flesh to-day

" I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole ! "
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, "All good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps
soul."*

How fresh this seems — how full of the sweet,
sharp breath of the new day! but here, too,
Pope after his own fashion has been first in the
field. To him the fixity of virtue boasted of by
the mere stoic is but a fixity like that of frost.
' Strength of mind,' he says, ' is exercise not
rest,' and while on the ocean of life over which
we are all sailing reason is the card which

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 145

guides, passion is the gale which sends the ship
bounding over the billows to the haven where
she would be.

' Nor God alone in the still calm we find,
He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind.'

Everyone knows the passage which sets forth
and illustrates Pope's theory of a ruling passion
as a motive power of conduct; and it is this
passion to which he refers in the lines which, it
will be seen, bear a curious resemblance, not
merely in thought but in phraseology, to the
passages quoted from Professor Seeley and
Browning.

1 Th' Eternal Art, educing good from ill,
Grafts on this Passion our best principle :
'Tis thus the Mercury of Man is fixed,
Strong grows the Virtue with his nature mitfd ;
The dross cements what else were too refin'd,
And in one interest body acts with mind.
As fruits, ungrateful to the planter's care,
On savage stocks inserted, learn to bear;
The surest Virtues thus from Passions sAoot,
Wild Nature's vigour working at the root.'

There is no need to press Pope's claims too
vehemently, or to urge them with exaggeration
of emphasis; but surely it is bare justice to say
that those who accuse him of merely superficial
thinking raise a suspicion that they themselves

K

146 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

have been guilty of hasty and careless reading.
Nor can they justify their charge by the plea
that Pope simply versified the thought of
Bolingbroke. What is the explanation of the
fact that to-day, though Pope is not read as he
ought to be read, the readers of the Essay on
Man are numbered by thousands, while readers
of Bolingbroke, — one of the most brilliant
writers of English prose — are numbered by
units ? No explanation is possible but this, —
that Pope, though he may not have originated
the intellectual substance of the Essay has given
to it the finally satisfying expression; and this
he could not have done by merely translating
it from prose into verse, but only by thinking
it, as it were, over again, for no one can
rightly utter the thought that he has not
made his own.

There was no Bolingbroke behind the Essay
on Criticism, but it is not less rich than the
Essay on Man in the ripe fruit of plain sense,
the unpretentious but practical wisdom of the
Understanding. Open the poem almost any-
where, and we see how Pope goes straight to
the heart of the matter in hand, how he says
just the true thing in the best possible way,
and therefore the final way. No question, for

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 147

example, has been more fiercely discussed than
this — Is Art to be judged by the measure of
its truth to Nature as Nature is observed by
the individual artist, or by the measure of its
conformity to certain traditions of fitness which
long prestige has rendered classical ? We
should expect Pope to take his cue from the
conventional spirit of his age which was domi-
nated by Renaissance influences; but as a
matter of fact his verdict is in favour both of
the direct study of Nature and of loyalty to
classical traditions of Art, because he sees that
the two are really one.

' First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same :
Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of Art.'

1 Nature the source and end and test of
Art' might have served as a motto for the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a justification for
all their eccentricities and rebellions. But
Pope would not have been a Pre-Raphaelite,
for this is not his last word.

' Those Rules of old discover'd, not devised,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz'd;

148 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

Nature, like liberty, is but restrain'd

By the same laws which first herself ordain' J.'

' When first young Maro in his boundless mind
A work t'outlast immortal Rome design'd,
Perhaps he seem'd above the critic's law,
And but from Nature's fountains scorned to draw :
But when t'examine every part he came,
Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.'

These rules, these great examples, must, how-
ever, be to the poet (for it is the poet of whom
Pope is mainly writing) as guide-posts, indicat-
ing generally the way he should go; not as
walls compelling him to tread undeviatingly
the beaten track. Those are graces which no
methods can teach, because they come not by
foresight but by fortune; lucky licenses which
disown authority but which, in virtue of their
success, become authorities themselves; glorious
offences of ( great wits ' who : —

* From vulgar bounds with grave disorder part,
And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,
Which, without passing thro' the judgment, gains
The heart, and all its end at once attains.'

This is really as profound as it is pellucid; not
one whit less profound in its way than the

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 149

illuminating words of Polixenes in The Winter s
Tale :—

* Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean; so, o'er that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes.

This is an art

Which does not mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.'

In both passages we see common sense at its
highest — the wisdom of the Understanding
which discriminates and compares, rising into
the wisdom of the Reason which sees. Even,
however, when it remains on its lower levels
among the most familiar simplicities of obser-
vation or reflection, it always leaves behind it
the satisfaction given by adequacy of accom-
plishment. Indeed it is not distinguished from
other poetry by choice of theme or even in
the strictest sense of the word by treatment of
theme; it is poetry which is found wherever
the poet — be his matter or manner what it
may — estimates fairly the possibilities of expres-
sion existing in himself, and the possibilities of
being expressed which exist in his subject.

Kingsley thought of Pope as pre-eminently the
poet of plain sense, and Dryden, Johnson, Gold-
smith, Crabbe and Cowper, whose manner is in

ISO THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

varying degrees akin to Pope's, are not less
entitled to the designation; but the fact that
these men belong to one literary school may
easily betray the unwary into a specious error of
intellectual grouping. They represent what is
called, perhaps not very accurately, the classical
manner of feeling and handling; whereas Shelley
and his school represent the manner which is
known as romantic; but the controversy between
the adherents of ' plain sense ' and the devotees
of the 4 seventh heaven' is not one with the
weary and interminable controversy between
classicism and romanticism. The questions to be
asked before deciding whether a writer belongs
to the sensible or pseudo-celestial order of poets
are not 'Does he write in the trim couplets
of Pope, or in the bounding lyrical measures
of Shelley ? ' i Does he celebrate Nature con-
ventionalised or Nature free ? ' * Is his philo-
sophy the philosophy of pedestrian empiricism or
of soaring transcendentalism ? ' but, * Have his
conceptions, be they lofty or lowly, the coherent
sanity of substance which alone lends itself to
clear presentation in a satisfying artistic form ? '
and ( Are such conceptions within or beyond his
reach; does he dominate them or is he dominated
by them ? ' Matthew Arnold has observed that

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 151

Keats renders Nature, while Shelley tries to
render her. With the truth of the special
criticism I have no immediate concern ; but the
words are cited because they indicate with such
clear conciseness the essential difference between
two classes of poetic craftsmen. It is this perfec-
tion of rendering — whether of nature or of
human life, of thought, sentiment or emotion —
which makes such a term as ( poet of plain sense '
a term of absolute praise, instead of being like
classical or romantic, subjective or objective, an
epithet which may be used either by way of
eulogy or of reproach. Mr W. M. Rossetti, for
example, depreciates Coleridge's Ancient Mariner
on the ground that he finds it ' defective in the
core of common sense,' and while the finding
may possibly be questioned, every judicious
reader will feel that if it be admitted the verdict
of depreciation based upon it is perfectly just;
for by deficiency in common sense the writer
means a lack of that organic coherence of sub-
stance which is as essential to the conviction of
the imagination as is sound logic to the convic-
tion of the reason. Such a lack is not merely a
defect from this or that point of view — it is a
defect from any point of view — a fault in itself.
The opposite merit is to be found not only

152 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

in the classical didactics of Pope, Dryden, and
the earlier Georgians but in the romantic nar-
rative and descriptive poetry of Byron and
Scott; it is not wanting in the meditatively
observant work of Wordsworth. It is not neces-
sary in order to praise the poetry of common
sense consistently, that we should prefer the
work of the eighteenth century to that of the
men who are nearer to our own time — work
which necessarily comes home to us because it
speaks our own thought in our own dialect.
When Kingsley spoke of the dominating quality
of Pope's verse as having gone out, he meant
that it had gone out of fashion, not that it
had gone out of existence, for a cardinal in-
tellectual virtue does not perish with the men
of any generation ; — * the poetry of sense] to
adapt a line of Keats' * is never dead.' Just at
the present, more's the pity, Byron and Scott
are largely sharing the fate of Pope — they have
gone out; and we have been told again and
again that their loss of vogue is due to the
absence from their work of a certain exquisite-
ness of apprehension, a subtilty of sensation, a
mastery of complexities of technique, of all those
vague virtues of conception and treatment which
are summed up in the one blessed word (dis-

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 153

tinction.' These things are certainly not to be
discerned in Childe Harold or The Lady of the
Lake, but one has a shrewd suspicion that what
is found amiss in these poems by the noisiest
class of contemporary connoisseurs is not the
absence of something, but the presence of some-
thing else — of that fine manly robustness, that
sturdy directness, that simple instinctive swift-
ness of touch which embodies a clear and vivid
conception in a perfectly representative literary
form that stands a silent reproach to the in-
effective prettiness, the oracular obscurity and
the convulsive strain of the verse which, because
it can never touch or move the normally con-
stituted human being, is on the principle of
lucus a non lucendo, spoken of as 'intimate.'

This intimacy is supposed to be specially
manifest in the treatment of Nature by con-
temporary poets of the seventh heaven; and in
their verse Nature is certainly exploited as she
has never been exploited before. She has be-
come a Diana pursued to her most private
haunts by a literary Actaeon with note-book in
hand; but the notes that he makes give one
the impression of being the jottings of an eaves-
dropper, not the confidences of a favoured lover.
Even in Pope's Windsor Forest, with all its

154 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

conventional phraseology, one is conscious of a
simple, more instinctive, and therefore more
genuine enjoyment of Nature than is to be
found in the work of certain living poets, who
have, indeed, abjured convention for cram.
Where, now, it may be asked, save here and
there in the work of poets like Lord Tennyson,
Browning, and Matthew Arnold, do we read
poetry which brings us into such veritable touch
with the life of the elements as that of which
we are made conscious by the virile stanzas of
Byron ?

' All heaven and earth are still — though not in sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep :
All heaven and earth are still : From the high host
Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain-coast,
All is concenter'd in a life intense
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost
But hath a part of being, and a sense,
Of that which is of all Creator and defence.

The sky is changed ! — and such a change ! Oh night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong.
Yet lovely in your strength as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman ! Far along,
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
Leaps the live thunder ! Not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud ! •

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 155

Such pictorial description as this, producing
its effects so simply, so directly, is, not less
than the measured epigrammatic didacticism of
Pope, the poetry of common sense; because
diverse as are their indwelling spirit and their
outward form, they both exhibit the calm
supremacy of fulfilled accomplishment, not the
contortion of ineffectual strain. We have fine
didactic poetry now that is very different from
the didactic poetry of Pope and Johnson, having
less of glitter and more of warmth, fewer of
the accents of the world, more of the inspired
tone of solitary vision; but it has the same notes
of clearness, simplicity, sufKcingness. These are
heard in Arnold's stanza, —

1 We cannot kindle when we will

The fire that in the heart resides ;

The spirit bloweth and is still,

In mystery our soul abides.

But tasks in hours of insight will'd
Can be through hours of gloom fulfill'd.'

They are heard yet again in the lines of In
Memoriam, —

' Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell;
That mind and soul according well

May make^pne music as before

But vaster.3

156 THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE

Nor are they absent from, or inconsistent
with, the poetry of a sane and reverent mys-
ticism, which inspires Wordsworth's great Ode
on the Intimations of Immortality; for the
poet of plain sense is not the poet who is
distinguished from his aspiring peers by being
content to dwell in the flat lowlands of thought
and emotion, but by his gift of climbing without
giddiness, of breathing the air of the higher
summits without intoxication. The poetry of
common sense is seen at its best and strongest
not when imagination plods along the highway,
but when it stands upon the mountain top, as
in the Homeric Epic, the Divine Comedy of
Dante, the human tragedy of Shakspeare, the
Paradise Lost of Milton. In these supreme
efforts we are, however, impressed more im-
mediately and forcibly, by the Titanesque power
than by the sane and ordered co-ordination of
its expression; so therefore, when we name the
poetry of common sense, we naturally think of
the poetry in which the peculiar quality stands
free from the shadow of more splendid if not
more essential endowments; and the name
which comes to our lips will not be the name
of Homer or Shakspeare; it will be some such
name as that of Pope. Nor is he unworthy

THE POETRY OF COMMON SENSE 157

of the representative position. If it be urged
that his substance is too familiar to be arresting,
we may fairly ask, who made it familiar ?
whose stamp it was that gave to common metal
such universal currency ? The gentleman who
went to see Hamlet for the first time said that
it was c a good play but too full of quotations.'
We laugh at him, and half-an-hour afterwards
we ourselves remark with a grave face that
Pope's literary merits are considerable, but that
his thought is trite and commonplace. Be it so.
Sleep is commonplace, but Sancho Panza had
the grace to bless the man who invented it.
Common sense is not quite so common as it
ought to be, but it is nevertheless sufficiently
common to be despised by superior people. We
will therefore bless the men who have made it
common, and among our blessings a special
benediction shall be reserved for Alexander
Pope.

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

HAD Mr Robert Buchanan added to his other
achievements those of a politician and an orator
he would have rivalled the versatility of the
first Lord Lytton who was surely the most
variously endowed Englishman of his time.
Though, like his great contemporary Browning,
1 ever a fighter ' he has, so far as I know, kept
clear of the arena of political conflict, but he
has made his mark as poet, novelist, biographer,
(his sketch of David Gray is a delightful piece
of work) essayist, critic, and playwright; and
though it cannot truthfully be said of him
that he has touched nothing that he has not
adorned, it may surely be declared that in every
kind of intellectual labour to which he has put
his hand he has, somewhere or other, left an
impress which no seeing eye can mistake for
anything but the sign manual of genius. And

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 159

yet, curiously enough, while Mr Buchanan is
essentially a poet and a novelist, playwright,
and the rest only, as it were, par hasard, the
work which is most characteristic, most truly
his own, has obtained recognition noticeably
scanty when compared with that accorded to
the other work which speaks of a talent rather
than a personality. His novels good and bad —
and he has produced both — have been read by
thousands; night after night his plays, which
are sometimes little more than creditable jour-
neyman's work, have been greeted with the
applause of crowded houses; but his poetry,
though it has numerous and warm admirers,
cannot be said even yet to have caught the
ear of ' the great reading public,' — a fact that
is all the more curious because his verse, while
by no means devoid of the higher poetical
qualities which will always appeal exclusively
to the few is peculiarly rich in other qualities
which are, in the best sense of the word popular.
Yet, strange as it is, it is certainly true that
numbers of readers who could stand a fairly
rigorous examination in half-a-dozen contem-
porary poets both of the first and the second
rank will confess that Robert Buchanan is
known to them only by ' Phil Blood's Leap,'

160 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

or possibly also by (St Abe and his Seven
Wives.'

I have spoken of Mr Buchanan's versatility
as exhibited in various classes of intellectual
endeavour — poems, novels, plays, and so forth;
but if he is studied simply as a poet this ver-
satility is no less impressive. Apart from the
work of the laureate, no body of contemporary
verse presents the same variety of imaginative,
emotional and intellectual appeal; and though
variety is not in itself a thing of price, it be-
comes distinctly valuable when it can be recog-
nised as an indication of the fecundity of a
richly vitalised nature. Now this is the kind
of variety which is distinguishable in the work
of Mr Buchanan — the variety which must make
itself manifest in the outcome of an impulsive
energy which no single conduit of expression
suffices to exhaust. His purely lyrical poems —
such for example as 'The Fairy Reaper,' 'Spring
Song in the City,' and the lyrics in 'White
Rose and Red ' — are so full of the essential spirit
of song as to leave upon the mind of the sensi-
tive reader the impression that the writer is
pre-eminently a lyrist — a simple maker of the
winning music of melodious verse. Then, while
this impression is strong upon him, he turns to

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 161

other groups of poems, and finds that though
the purely sensuous charm of music is still
there, it has taken a subordinate place, and the
man who seemed but a singer reveals himself
as a dramatic creator, a philosophical mystic, a
winning story-weaver, a maker of ballads that
have the strength, simplicity and directness be-
longing to the ballad-work of a less sophisticated
day.

The poetry of ecstatic or rapturous song
when seen in its perfect and typical form,
as for example in the most characteristic
verse of Shelley, has the quality or the defect
— for to differing moods it may seem either
— of a certain unsubstantiality and vagueness
of outline, which find their visual correspond-
ence in the aspect of material objects seen
through mist or moonlight. When Mr
Buchanan's verse is most purely lyrical it
approaches this effect, but never quite reaches
it; it never quits its hold of the tangible,
never lacks the full humanity which is com-
pact of sense and soul in vital combination.
The difference is almost too subtle and
elusive to be expressed in terms of definition,
but its reality will be felt and its nature appre-
hended by any one who comes fresh from the

1 62 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

wonderful lyric in Shelley's Prometheus Un-
bound

* Life of life ! thy lips enkindle '

to any of the ' Songs of the Veil ' in The Book
of Orm, the Celt, where Mr Buchanan's work,
so far as outward form is concerned, bears the
strongest resemblance to the work of his great
predecessor. The later poet can never detach
himself from the simple familiarities of human
life, and even when the solemn veil is lifted and
the divine Face is disclosed he turns from the
ineffable vision to the homely world on which
the Face looks down.

' I awoke my body,

And up the mountains,

With the sweet sun shining

I wander'd free, —

And the hills were pleasant,

Knee-deep in heather,

And the yellow eagle

Wheel'd over me —
And the streams were flowing,
And the lambs were leaping

Merrily.

' Hard by I noted
Little children,
Toddling and playing
In a field of hay —

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 163

The Face was looking,
But they were gazing
At one another,

And what cared they ?
But one I noted,
A little maiden,
Look'd up o' sudden

And ceased her play,
And she dropt her garland
And stood upgazing,
With hair like sunlight,

And face like clay.'

Of course this is not quoted as an example of
Mr Buchanan's best work, but as an illustration
of that instinctive habit of nature which impels
him to reach things of spirit through the things
of sense, to find in simple familiar humanity an
avenue of approach to the unseen and the
spiritual. He does not strive to render the
mysterious awe of the unveiled Face in the
heavens : he shows it reflected in the face of
the child on Dearth.

It is natural that Mr Buchanan should turn
most frequently and spontaneously to those
kinds of work in which his native bent towards
the treatment of the simple humanities has full
play. To compare him with Chaucer would be
an absurd extravagance ; but it is not extravagant
to say that since Chaucer we have had no poet

1 64 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

who can be more emphatically described as a
poet of flesh and blood. The name of Robert
Browning will occur to many as that of a poet
to whom the designation would apply, but
Browning's men and women are very largely
either representatives of exceptional types, or of
familiar types placed in an environment which
confers on them an unfamiliar interest — gener-
ally the kind of interest involved in a somewhat
complex moral problem. Mr Buchanan's men
and women have more of the primitive simple
every day humanity which makes a permanent
and universal appeal. Willie Baird, Attorney
Sneak, Liz, Nell, Widow Mysie, and the three
whose varying loves provide the tragic comedy
of White Rose and Red are obviously nearer to
the common mind and heart than are Bishop
Blougram, the Queen of In a Balcony, Sordello,
and Caponsacchi, highly vitalised as all these
creations undoubtedly are. In sheer vividness
of presentment the portrait of Widow Mysie the
fascinating inn-keeper—sensuous, warm-blooded,
cold-hearted and calculating— is a little master-
piece.

4 Oh, sweet was Widow Mysie, sweet and sleek !
The peach's blush and down were on her cheek,
And there were dimples in her tender chin

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 165

For Cupids small to hunt for kisses in;

Dark glossy were her ringlets, each a prize,

And wicked, wicked were her beaded eyes, —

Plump was her figure rounded and complete

And tender were her tiny tinkling feet !

All this was nothing to the warmth and light

That seemed to hover o'er her day and night ; —

Where'er she moved, she seem'd to soothe and please

With pleasant murmurs as of bumble bees ;

Her small plump hands on public missions flew

Like snow-white doves that flying croon and coo ;

Her feet fell patter, cheep, like little mice ;

Her breath was soft with sugar and with spice ;

And when her fingers — so ! — your hand would press

You tingled to the toes with loveliness,

While her dark eyes with lessening zone in zone

Flasht sunlight on the mirrors of your own

Dazzling your spirit with a wicked sense

That seems more heavenly-born than innocence.'

This is an example of Mr Buchanan's frankly
realistic manner, in which the vigorous effec-
tiveness of his flesh and blood treatment of a
selected individual or type is most plainly
apparent; but there is not less of rich warm
vitality in the portraits painted with more of
idealistic, romantic, or — as some would put it — -
poetic feeling. Such eminently characteristic
poems as 'Meg Blane,' 'The Scaith of Bartle,'
1 The Glamour,' and ' Poet Andrew ' must be
studied as wholes; but a few stanzas may be
taken from a winning portrait study which has

1 66 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

not, I think, been reprinted from the pages of
the Argosy where I read it many years ago. It
was called l A London Lyric ' and might with
propriety have been included in the volume of
London Poems.

' Bell from the North hath journeyd hither,
She brings the scent of heather with her,

To show in what sweet glens she grew, —
Where'er she treads in any weather,
She steps as if she trod on heather,

And leaves a sense like dropping dew.

1 The mountains own her for their daughter,
Her presence feels like running water

Cool'd from the sun in a green glade;
So strange she seems to city seeing, —
A playmate of the winds, a being

Made of the dew and mountain shade.

* In the strange street she stops to listen,
Her red lips part, her blue eyes glisten,

Wild windy voices round her speak;
She sees the streets roll dark and clouded,
Fearless as when she paused enshrouded

By mists upon a mountain peak.

' And oft, while wondrous eyed she wanders,"
She meets a sweet face, pauses, ponders,

And then peers backward as she goes, —
As in the far-off solemn places,
She drooped the tenderest of faces

Over some tender thing that grows.

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 167

1 Long have the clouds and winds been by her,
Long have the waters murmured nigh her,
And sweet delight in these hath she ;
Long has she watched the shapes of wonder
Darken around with crying thunder,
Yet all have used her tenderly.

When mighty shapes had love and pity,
What should appal her in the city ?

What should she fear in sun or shower ?
The cloud of life is pleasure-laden,—
She fears it not,— she is a maiden

Familiar with the things of power.

'Yet is she;made in mortal fashion, —
A thing of pureness and of passion,

A winning thing of eyes and lips,
A maiden with a cheek to sigh on,
A waist to clasp, a heart to die on —

Kiss-worthy to the finger-tips ! '

The vivid realisation which makes these and
a score of other portraits glow with the warmth
of life is not less manifest in Mr Buchanan's
rendering of nature and in his treatment of
incident and situation. No nature - poetry of
our time is less subjective than his, or freer
from the intrusion of that ; pathetic fallacy '
which, fascinating as it often is, denotes, as Mr
Ruskin has shown, a lapse from perfect veracity

1 68 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

of imaginative vision. He is doubtless saved
from it both by that healthful outwardness of
mind which distinguishes the poet of observa-
tion and creation from the poet of sentiment
and reflection, and partly by his absorbing
interest in humanity which impels him to utilise
Nature as a background rather than as a theme.
The masterly and impressive picture of the
great snow in White Rose and Red, so rich
in rapid touches of detail and yet so broad in
general effect, seems at first sight to have been
painted for its own sake; but we soon perceive
that, whatever be the feeling of the reader,
it is to the poet simply, if one may so call it,
an expedient — a means to the intensification of
the pure human interest by the addition of a
new element of terror and pathos to the weary
pilgrimage of poor Red Rose to the home of
the man who has deserted her. It is so every-
where. Nature is always subsidiary, but when-
ever its aspects or objects come into the com-
position as necessary elements they are presented
with almost the substance and tangibility of
things which appeal directly to the physical
sensibilities of sight, hearing and touchs. The
force of the wind, the emptiness of the sky, the
swirl of the sea, the mass of the mountain im-

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 169

press us just in that same vivid way that we
are impressed by the palpitating humanity of
the men and women.

Such endowments as these are pre-eminently
the endowments of the balladist ; and Mr Buch-
anan's work has nearly always the ballad feeling,
and frequently the ballad form as well. For
reasons too obvious to need statement the mak-
ing of ballads— without the final * e ' — is rapidly
becoming a lost art, but Mr Buchanan is one of
the very few surviving inheritors of the old
tradition. ' The Ballad of Judas Iscariot,' one
of its author's most arresting performances,
has the directness, simplicity, and glamour of
the ancient work, but the intellectual or spiritual
conception which dominates it belongs to our
own day, and therefore with all its power and
beauty it is hardly so representative as are some
of Mr Buchanan's other achievements in this
manner. 'The Lights of Leith' might, how-
ever, be a genuine antique, and it may be worth
noting that it was the predecessor by some
years of Rossetti's noble poem (The King's
Tragedy,' the only contemporary ballad with
which it can properly be compared.

' " The lights o' Leith J the lights o' Leith ! "
The skipper cried aloud —

17° ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

While the wintry gale with snow and hail
Blew snell thro' sail and shroud.

1 " The lights o' Leith ! the lights o' Leith ! "

As he paced the deck cried he —
" How merrily bright they burn this night
Thro' the reek o' the stormy sea ! "

' As the ship ran in thro' the surging spray

Afire seemed all the town ;
They saw the glare from far away,
And safely steer'd to the land-locked bay,
They cast their anchor down.

' " 'Tis sure a feast in the town o' Leith,"

(To his mate the skipper spoke),
"And yonder shadows that come and go
Across the quay where the bonfires glow,

Are the merry-making folk." '

But it is not a feast; it is for a much more
grim and gruesome function that the fires are
blazing on the quay of Leith. Twenty years
before, the mate who with the skipper is watch-
ing the flickering flames and the black figures
which pass and repass before them, has run away
from his home and his widowed mother, drawn
by the allurements of the adventurous life of
the, sea, and now he is returning to her who,
he knows, has been waiting for him so wearily,
perhaps so despairingly. He leaps on shore and
eagerly speeds to the familiar cottage, but
though there are lights on the shore there are

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 171

none in the little window. Still, his mother
may be safely asleep in bed, but his eager knock-
ing meets with no reply. The terrible thought
of death overwhelms his spirit, though he does
not, cannot guess the awful truth. A form
draws near the darkness and reveals the haggard
countenance of a kinswoman who slowly tells the
piteous story. The superstitious pedant King
James VI had landed at Leith trembling at
the terrors of the sea, and convinced that the
spells of witchcraft had raised the storm that
had threatened his sacred person. When kings
demanded witches there were plenty to find
them, and among the three that were found was
the lonely old woman.

1 " They bade her tell she had wrought the spell

That made the tempest blaw;
They strippit her bare as a naked bairn,
They tried her wi' pincers and heated aim
Till she shriek'd and swooned awa'!

1 " O Robin, Robin, the King sat there,

While the cruel deed was done,
And the clergy o' Christ ne'er bade him spare
For the sake o' God's ain Son : . . ."

1 The lights of Leith : the lights of Leith :

Like Hell's own lights they glow
While the sailor stands with his trembling hands
Prest hard on his heart in woe.

172 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

' " O Robin, Robin . . . they doom'd her to burn

Down yonner upon the quay . . .

This night was the night ... see the light, see the light :
How it burns by the side o' the sea ! "

The distraught man can hear no more : he
rushes madly towards the pyramids of flame
that redden the night.

1 What madman is he who leaps in where they gleam,

Close, close to the centremost form ?
" O mither, O mither : " he cries with a scream,
That rings through the heart of the storm.

' He can see the white hair snowing down through the glare,

The white face upraised to the skies —
Then the cruel red blaze blots the thing from his gaze,
And he falls on his face — and dies.

' The lights of Leith : the lights of Leith :

See, see they are flaming still :
Through the clouds of the past their flame is cast
While the Sabbath bells ring shrill.

* The lights of Leith : the lights of Leith :

They'll burn till the Judgment Day,
Till the Church's curse and the monarch's shame
And the sin that slew in the Blessed Name
Are burned and purged away ! '

This is such powerful work that were any
critic to declare Mr Buchanan pre-eminently
a balladist it would be difficult to show effective
reasons for dissent from his verdict. If, how-
ever, I were to ask myself the question * What

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 173

has this poet done that no one else has done at
all, or done quite so well, or done quite in the
same way, — in short, what is the unique element
in his work ? ' I should find its answer not in
the longer narrative poems such as White Rose
and Red, Balder, or his more recent allegorical
volumes, not in such dramatic or semi-dramatic
performances as Political Mystics and Saint
Abe, not in his sonnets or miscellaneous lyrics,
not even in his ballads; but partly in the
London Poems and in other studies of the
homely or terrible realities of the life of the
poor, and partly in those remarkable contri-
butions to the literature of poetic mysticism
which are most adequately represented in The
Book of Orm, the Celt.

In his choice of subjects for the majority of
his London Poems it may be frankly admitted
that Mr Buchanan did not take an entirely new
departure from recognised poetic conventions.
He followed the lead of Wordsworth, who in
the earlier days of the century had ' sought the
huts where poor men lie/ and had succeeded
in idealising the most apparently unpromising
material, not by ignoring or tampering with
prosaic details, but by exhibiting them in front
of a moral or emotional background suffused

174 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

with a light which transfigured and glorified
them. It may, however, be noted that Words-
worth had an advantage over the later poet,
inasmuch as his poems of the poor were,
mainly, indeed almost exclusively, rural idylls.
The lowliest life spent in the country, howso-
ever prosaic in itself, is lived in an atmosphere
which is essentially and obviously poetic; and
for the imaginative cultivator of cottage do-
mesticities the ground is, as it were, prepared.
The poet of lowly town life has no such pre-
paratory assistance. He has to mould to his
purpose material which is not merely non-poetic
but apparently anti-poetic; he has to deal with
a life that is not simply unlovely but squalidly
vulgar; and it was in setting himself to this
special task that Mr Buchanan won the honours
of the successful pioneer. It is not, however,
the writer's choice of theme but his victorious
treatment of it which sets these poems in a
place apart. Years before Mr Buchanan wrote
the monologue of 'Nell,' in which the young
mother who is not a wife pours out her agonised
lamentations for the lover who is to die upon
the scaffold, Thomas Hood had sung of the
suicide of an * unfortunate,' and by so singing
had defied the old traditions of poetical respect-

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 175

ability. Still in the midst of the defiance there
was a suggestion of compromise. Hood did not
dare to be quite true to the actual, and the
picture is accordingly painted with a delicately
eclectic brush. Everyone knows that any pre-
sentment of such a subject as that treated in
* The Bridge of Sighs ' in which there appears
4 only the beautiful,' is not simply an idealisation
but a distortion of reality; and while true ideali-
sation may enhance the essential veracity of any
work of art, this false idealisation must always
detract from it. There are two errors into one
of which those poets who deal with homely
human themes are peculiarly liable to fall. The
first is that of men who, like Hood, preserve the
poetry by keeping back some of the truth; the
second is that of a writer like Crabbe who lets
us see all the truth, but is, as a rule, unable to
show us the underlying poetry. There are few
men who in delineating the wastes and morasses
of the human landscape can give us both Dich-
tung and Wahrheit, but the name of one of the
few is Robert Buchanan.

The poem entitled ' Liz ' provides an in-
teresting and striking example of this strenuous
fidelity to the central truth of things. ' Liz '
is a girl of the slums who has never seen a green

1 76 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

field or walked between the hedges of a rural
lane; and standing out among the memories of
the short and troubled life she is leaving behind
her is the memory of one day when she stole
away from the familiar street and knew for
once what the country meant. It is an attrac-
tive theme that lends itself readily to handling
that is at once graceful, sympathetic and not
apparently untruthful. If we ask what emotion
supplies the obvious key-note of such a sketch,
the almost universal reply would be the girl's
rapturous delight in the grass of the meadow,
the flower by the wayside, the open undimmed
sky. But Mr Buchanan will have none of it,
and Liz feels no delight but only a strange
homelessness — a dull wonder which is neither
pleasant nor painful, but which seems further
removed from pleasure than from pain.

' How swift the hours sped on \ — and by and by

The sun grew red, big shadows filled the sky,
The air grew damp with dew.
And the dark night was coming down I knew.

Well, I was more afraid than ever then,

And felt that I should die in such a place —
So back to London town I turned my face,

And crept into the cheerful streets again;

And when I breathed the smoke and heard the roar,
Why, I was better, for in London here
My heart was busy, and I felt no fear.

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 177

I never saw the country any more,
And I have stayed in London well or ill —
I would not stay out yonder if I could,
For one feels dead, and all looks pure and good —
I could not bear a life so bright and still.'

'The cheerful streets,' 'in London here my
heart was busy and I felt no fear,' * I could not
bear a life so bright and still ' — what strokes
of penetrating truthfulness are these ! We feel
that the poet of * Nell ' and ' Liz ' has that
catholicity and virility of imagination which
subjects the ' shows of things ' to the ' desires
of the mind ' not by the timorous handling of
eclecticism, but by the vigorous grasp of the
athlete who wrestles with things evil and ugly,
and will not let them go until they whisper
their secret of beauty.

It is not often that the work of a poet
provides such a marked change of atmosphere
as that of which we are conscious when we
turn from the London Poems to The Book
of Orm, the Celt. It is a passage from all
hateful tangibilities of sense to all lovely phan-
toms of vision, from Seven Dials to the Seventh
Heaven; and yet we know that between the
two products of the one mind there can be

no breach of personal continuity — that an ade-

M

178 ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

quate synthesis would exhibit them in obvious
and inevitable relations to their source. Nor,
indeed, are these relations obscure or difficult
of discernment. In the London Poems the
most perplexing problems of human life are
propounded in those concrete forms which show
them in their very nakedness of perplexity.
In the Book of Orm there is — not a solution
of them : that were too much to expect ; but an
instinctive outgoing of the spirit in the only
direction in which it feels that a solution may
possibly be found. From the first ' Song
of the Veil,' in which we read —

1 How God in the beginning drew
Over her face the Veil of blue.'

We are led through the ' Songs of Corruption '
with that strange weird * Dream of the World
without Death/ through the ( Songs of Seeking,'
through the sections entitled ' The Man and the
Shadow,' 'The Lifting of the Veil,' and that
most fascinating series of poems 'The Devil's
Mystics ' to that marvellous * Vision of the Man
Accurst ' which is to all that has gone before it
at once a climax and an interpretation. The
veil has been drawn not merely before the
arcana of the methods of nature, the mysteries of

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 179

life and death, but before the secret things of
divine providence — before that most wonderful
secret of all, the mystery of divine redemption
by love. In this final vision we are again in the
region of the concrete, for the man who is lifted
by the wild wind and whirled away from the
heavenly gate to the dark ice-bound shore of the
underworld where he stands or stalks, shivering
and despairing, crying only for

1 A face to look upon, a heart that beats,
A hand to touch,—'

is, in all human essentials, a figure who might
have filled the central place in one of the
London Poems. It is only the conditions that
are reversed. In the earlier book we are before
the veil; in the later book we are behind it; and
to the emancipated imagination of the poet are
disclosed the living forces which work for salva-
tion in that inner light which to the eye of
sense is but darkness. Perhaps for most readers
the best way of studying this volume of mystical
utterances is to read the last poem first,— as in it
the informing idea of the whole work is seen
free from the symbolism which, though to
certain races — and to certain minds of every
race — the most natural mode of presenting a

i8o ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET

spiritual conception, is to the average English-
man a hindrance rather than a help. If, how-
ever, this method be adopted, the significance of
the book can hardly be missed even by the most
matter-of-fact reader. It is a vindication of that
higher optimism which does not content itself
with a lazy repetition of the maxim ' whatever
is, is right,' but only with an assured faith in
a Being whose existence and activity provide a
guarantee that the thing which is and which is
recognised as evil must be doomed to ultimate
destruction. This is the plea itself; and the
force of its emotional logic lies in the fact that
the apparent incredibility of this conception of
a prevailing goodness is frankly admitted — is
indeed insisted upon through all the poems
which are informed with the symbolism of the
veil; afad that yet, notwithstanding this insist-
ence the final impression is not one of dubi-
tation but of assured faith.

This is not a critical estimate of Mr Buch-
anan's poetry, it is, to use Mr Pater's happy
word, an 'appreciation' of those portions of it
which one reader out of many has found of
special worth and interest. Picturesqueness,
passion, humour, and pathos, fecundity of
imagination, felicity of fancy, and variety of

ROBERT BUCHANAN AS POET 181

melody are all present in his verse, but it has
seemed well to one admirer of it to lay final
emphasis upon something which belongs less to
its art than to its substance — the spiritual vision
which discerns the divine in the human; which
sees in the lost souls of Judas Iscariot, the
nameless 'man accurst,' and Ratcliffe Meg of
'Tiger Bay'—

' A spark that grows in the dark ;
A spark that burns in the brain ;
Spite of the curse and the stain ;
Over the sea and the plain,
And in street and lane.'

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW
(1892)

HAD this page been printed a quarter of a
century ago and been glanced at curiously by,
say, a thousand people, it is safe to conjecture
that 999 of them would certainly have asked
1 Who was Hawker ? ' and unless they were West
countrymen, might possibly have added the
further question, * Where is Morwenstow ? '
During his life-time Robert Stephen Hawker
might almost have been classed among the
obscure : during the eighteen years which have
elapsed since his death, the little group of lovers
has grown into a crowd ; and in the mind's
eye of every member of it the fascinatingly
picturesque figure of the poet-priest is always
seen standing out vividly against the wild back-
ground of iron crags which give a frontier to
his Cornish sea-board parish. For the man
Hawker oblivion has so far scattered her poppies

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 183

in vain, and as long as he is remembered the
place whose only fame is his will^ be familiar
and beloved. He will always^be Hawker of
Morwenstow.

Like another interesting person who in death
gained the recognition denied him in life —
the late John Sterling — Hawker has had two
biographers of greater contemporary note than
himself. Mr Baring-Gould and Dr F. G. Lee
have both given us a record of his ways and
works, and each biography has its special points
of interest ; but as the latter deals mainly with
Hawker the ecclesiastic the former presents
by far the most vivid and realisable portrait.
Robert Stephen Hawker was born at Stoke
Damorel on the $rd of December 1804 and was
the son of Mr J. S. Hawker, a medical man
practising in Plymouth who afterwards took
orders, and became first curate, then vicar, of
Stratton in Cornwall. The boy's paternal
grandfather was the well-known Dr Hawker, in-
cumbent of Charles Church, Plymouth, author
of the once popular devotional work Morning
and Evening Portions, and of the still popular
hymn beginning, 'Lord, dismiss us with Thy
blessing/ which is in many collections attri-
buted to other authors, poor Dr Hawker being

1 84 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

thus robbed of what is now his sole title-deed
to fame. The boy Robert had been committed
to the educational care of his grandfather ; and
being, as ill-luck would have it, ignorant of the
fact that the hymn was a tribal fetish and there-
fore tabu, had the audacity to inform the author
that it was 'crude and flat,' and to produce a
composition of his own on similar lines which
he blandly declared to be an * improved version/
Such a critic at the hearth was not to be
tolerated by any Doctor of Divinity ; and as the
too daring boy contracted a habit of practical
joking, of which his grandfather's feminine ad-
mirers were the victims, his sojourn at Plymouth
was not prolonged, At home, however, he played
tricks more fantastic than ever, and after a
brief and brilliant career as a not unpopular
village Ishmael was despatched to the Grammar
School of Cheltenham where he studied fitfully,
read voraciously, and wrote many quires of
verse, the visible outcome of this last occupation
being a little volume of poems entitled ' Tendrils,
by Reuben.' The booklet was not remarkable
in any way, and not even interesting save as
another illustration of the fact that even in the
work of unmistakably original poets imitative-
ness precedes individuality. From Cheltenham

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 185

Hawker passed to Pembroke College, Oxford,
but he had been in residence only a year when
his father, now a poor curate, had to tell his son
that for want of means his university career
must come to an end. The young man, how-
ever, determined that the means should be
forthcoming ; and he had recourse to an expedi-
ent so original in conception that no novelist
careful of his reputation for verisimilitude would
dare to make artistic use of it. Some few miles
from Stratton lived the four Misses I'ans who
had jointly inherited a fair estate and who pos-
sessed also separate incomes of £200 apiece.
One of these ladies, Miss Charlotte I'ans, was at
this time forty-one years of age, or one year
older than Hawker's mother — she had been his
godmother and had taught him his letters, and
as soon as the young student learned his father's
decision he resolved that this mature lady should
become his wife. With characteristic impetu-
osity he did not wait to think twice ; he did not
wait even to put on^ his hat ; but ran bare-
headed from Stratton to Bude ; reached his
destination hot and blown, and made his as-
tounding proposal. Almost stranger than the
offer itself was its instantaneous acceptance.
'The heart of Miss I'ans,' writes Mr Baring-

i86

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

Gould, * was taken by storm ' j in November
1824 when Hawker was twenty years of age, the
curiously assorted pair were married ; and till
parted by death many years afterwards lived a
life of idyllic happiness and unfailing mutual
love and devotion. The young husband now
pursued his studies at Magdalen Hall, taking
care at the same time to preserve mental flexi-
bility by sportive recreations like unto those by
which he had won fame in boyhood. Memor-
able among these was his triumphant appeal to
the superstitious credulity of the simple-minded
natives of Bude where he and his wife spent the
long vacation. On a moonlight night of the
July of 1825 or 1826 he swam or rowed out to a
rock at some little distance from the shore,
adorned himself with a flowing wig of seaweed,
enveloped his naked legs in an oilskin wrapper,
and sitting on the rock in this imperfect but
aesthetic costume flashed the moonbeams about
from a hand mirror, and sang aloud until he had
attracted the attention of some passers-by who
ran into Bude declaring themselves the dis-
coverers of a genuine mermaid. They quickly
returned with other lovers of the marvellous,
and for several nights the mermaid, like
Manoah's angel, ' did wondrously,' each succes-

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 187

sive performance being witnessed by a larger
crowd of awe-struck spectators ; but the night
air even in July was chill, the singer became
hoarse with his efforts, and so one evening he
concluded the entertainment with a sturdy ren-
dering of 'God save the King,' dived into the
waves and reappeared no more.

Feats of this kind seem odd preparations for
the priestly life, but one gets the idea that
Hawker was one of those who lived both on
the surface and at the centre — who could, to
use Matthew Arnold's phrase be 'gay without
frivolity.' Already had been lighted a fire of
enthusiasm for what he believed to be his
divine vocation, and though nothing is to be
learned of the inner life of these 'prentice days,
we know that they must have been days of seed-
sowing and germination in the darkness, prepar-
atory to the harvest which was to be gathered
in the light. Hawker duly took his degree,
having gained the Newdegate prize for his poem
on 'Pompeii' — probably, one would think, a
congenial theme — was ordained deacon in 1829
and priest two years afterwards. He was ap-
pointed to a curacy at North Tamerton where
he remained until 1834, when he accepted from
Bishop Philpotts of Exeter, the small living of

1 88 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

Morwenstow; and here in this out-of-the-world
parish he was destined to remain during the
forty years which lay before him, and to live a
life of arduous service, which in itself and in its
picturesque surroundings makes an appeal to
the emotions and the imagination riot less im-
pressive than that made by the life of many a
mediaeval saint.

Morwenstow — the Stow or station of the
Cornish Saint Morwenna — hides itself among
the cliffs of one of the wildest portions of the
wild coast of Cornwall. A long line of curi-
ously contorted crags stretches northward to the
point of Hartland, and south-westward to far
Tintagel, whose cliff stands out black against
the crimson and amber of sunset. The visitor
— a more common object of the country now
than he was sixty years ago — approaches the
little village by a lonely road, which passes for
miles between scanty hedgerows with never a
tree to break the monotony. As it nears the
sea the road suddenly dips, and the stranger
catches his first glimpse of the pinnacled tower
of the grey church of Morwenstow with, below
it in the glen, the roof and quaint chimneys of
the vicarage; and behind these the horizon line
which on bright summer days divides the blue

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 189

of wide-spread waters from the blue of windless
skies. On such days the quiet little spot, 'far
from noise and smoke of town/ seems a verit-
able 'home of ancient peace,' and yet, as has
been said by one who knew it well, ' no one can
wander along the summit of the cliffs without a
consciousness that he is looking upon a giant, at
rest indeed for a time, but more full of strength
and more really terrible than any of the Cor-
morans or the Goemagots, who left their foot-
prints and their strongholds on the hills of
Cornwall.' All along the pitiless coast are little
village churchyards, under whose turf rests
many a victim of wave and crag; and in that of
Morwenstow, the crews ^of scores of doomed
vessels were laid to rest by the vicar who read
the words of Christian hope in the ears of the
little band which he had trained to go out as
searchers for the storm-slain mariners.

The dwellers in this region had been for
generations as tameless as the billows which
broke upon their cliffs, fearing not God nor re-
garding man ; unscrupulous smugglers j ruth-
less wreckers ; Ishmaels of the shore and sea.
For years before Hawker's appearance the moral
darkness had been unbroken even by the one
beacon which had been raised to bear witness to

190 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

the light — the grey sanctuary which the di-
sciples of Morwenna had built for God beside
the Severn Sea. For more than a century there
had not been a resident vicar, and the last
dweller at the vicarage had been more apt to
grow merry over his port than earnest in his
labours, leaving behind him as the sole relic of
his works and days a gigantic lantern ingeni-
ously constructed of fragments of wine-glasses,
broken when the mirth grew fast and furious — a
strange memento mori^ which came into the
hands of Hawker, and was by him transferred
to the original constructor and owner. During
the years, not of this wine-bibbing curate alone
but of many predecessors, there had been an
unhallowed unity of taste between parson and
people, and Hawker found that he had entered
into a heritage of worse than heathen tradition.
It was impossible that he should capitulate to
the parish Zeit Geist^ and it seemed little less
than impossible victoriously to withstand it.
In a fashion that was symptomatic of the man's
whole nature, of his high aspirations, his quaint
originality of utterance, and his ineradicable
tendency to raise the most prosaic facts of life
into an ideal region Hawker struck a keynote
which dominated the music of the years which

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 191

were to come. The annual value of the living
of Morwenstow was exactly ^£365, and to the
imagination of the new vicar the identity of the
number of pounds with the number of the days
in the year brought his stipend into an associa-
tive alliance with the divine procession of hours
and seasons, and thus conferred upon it a dower
of ethical impressiveness. The ^"365, paid pro-
bably in irredeemably commonplace instalments,
acquired a true mystical value, and over the
porch of the vicarage, Hawker inscribed the
lines : —

* A house, a glebe, a pound a day,
A pleasant place to watch and pray :
Be true to church, be kind to poor,
O minister ! for evermore.'

The lines were a prophecy which was nobly
fulfilled, — a prelude to long years of watching
and praying, of fidelity to the writer's ideal of a
Christian Church, of unremitting service to the
poor among whom his lot was cast, and to the
stranger hurled by stress of storm upon the
rugged Cornish shore. The history of the trans-
formation of the Morwenstow wreckers into the
Morwenstow rescuers with its stirring incidents
of deadly peril and dauntless courage, may be
read in Mr Baring-Gould's picturesque pages.

192 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

Of one set of the incidents of storm — incidents
not of Christian aid given to the living but of
Christian honour done to the dead — we have
commemorations written by Hawker himself in
prose and verse which can hardly be left un-
noted. There is, for example, the story of the
wreck of the ' Caledonia/ told partly by its sole
survivor and partly by his six weeks' host — too
long to be told again here, but made perman-
ently interesting by the one relic of the event
which remains to this day in the little church-
yard, and which provides a theme for one of
Hawker's tenderest and at the same time state-
liest lyrical utterances. In his prose narrative
the vicar of Morwenstow simply says, 'We
placed at the foot of the captain's grave the
figurehead of his vessel. It is a carved image
life-size, of his native Caledonia, in the garb of
her country, with shield and sword.' In the
not less simple poem he rose to that solemn,
measured music which was the natural language
of his impassioned moods.

' We laid them inltheir lowly rest,

The strangers of a distant shore,
We smoothed the green turf on their breast,

'Mid baffled ocean's angry roar;
And there, the relique of the storm,
We fixed fair Scotland's figured form.

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 193

' She watches by her bold, her brave,

Her shield towards the fatal sea :
Their cherished lady of the wave

Is guardian of their memory.
Stern is her look, but calm, for there
No gale can rend or billow bear.

1 Stand, silent image ! stately stand,

Where sighs shall breathe and tears be shed
And many a heart of Cornish land
Will soften for the stranger dead.
They came in paths of storm; they found
This quiet home in Christian ground.'

In one respect Hawker and his wild parishioners
had much in common, for his intense religious-
ness of nature, his eager imagination, and his
quick response to every appeal from the world of
marvel, impelled him not only to sympathise
with, but to share, many of the superstitions, so
called, of the simple Cornish folk. He believed
in the evil eye, which he professed himself able
to recognise by certain indications, and whenever
he met the gaze of a person in whom such indi-
cations were present, he would hold his thumb
and first two fingers in a peculiar manner to
avert from himself the malign influence. To the
familiar arguments, the statement of which in-
volves emphatic references to * the enlightened
nineteenth century ' Hawker had always the one
reply that he did not * pretend to be wiser than

N

J94 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

the Word of God,' in which he found that the
evil eye (St Mark vii. 21) is named with ' blas-
phemy, pride, and foolishness' as one of the
things that defile a man. The fact being thus
attested by the highest authority, rational ex-
planation was really needless, but Hawker ac-
cepted, nevertheless, the theory of Heliodorus,
Bishop of Tricca in Thessaly, that all men are
surrounded by an atmosphere impalpable to
the senses, which is a conductor of spiritual
influences just as water is a conductor of sound
and iron of electricity, and through which a
good or evil nature may make itself beneficently
or malevolently influential. As a matter of
course, the reality of witchcraft was among the
numerous articles in his miscellaneous creed,
and there was an old woman in Morwenstow of
whose unhallowed powers he believed he had
ocular demonstration. ' I have seen,' he used
to say, with an unmistakable accent of convic-
tion, 'the five black spots placed under her
tongue which are indications of what she is.
They are like those in the feet of swine, made
by the entrance into them of the demons of
Gadara.' The result might be entertaining if
some vivacious young man of letters, defying
chronology, would give us a Landorian imagin-

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW *95

ary conversation between the Rev. R. S.
Hawker and Professor Huxley on the subject
of the Gadarene miracle.

In the foregoing pages the word * picturesque '
has been more than once employed as a de-
scriptive epithet, and it has been used deliber-
ately, for Hawker's whole personality was
strikingly pictorial. Physically, he represented
a specially fine and striking type of manhood,
for he was tall, broad, and well-built, with
nobly modelled features, eyes that were full
and dark, and, in his later years, long, snowy
hair. His habitual garb rendered him a still
more noticeable figure. When he went to
Morwenstow he wore his cassock, but it did
not lend itself to climbing about the cliffs,
and he abandoned it for a claret coloured coat
with long tails, under which was displayed a
fisherman's blue jersey, with a small cross
knitted into the side at the place where his
Master's body had been pierced by the Roman
soldier's spear. The massive head was sur-
mounted by a brimless hat, like that of a Greek
archimandrite, of pink or flesh-coloured beaver;
and the orthodox clerical black — the one
colour which he detested and would not wear
even at a funeral — was represented in his cos-

196 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

tume only by the great fishing-boots which
reached above his knee.

The England of our time can have seen
few odder figures than that of the vicar of
Morwenstow, and perhaps had his lot been
cast among a more conventional community
than that to which he ministered, the man
of many colours and strange ways might
hardly have escaped the suspicion of mental
aberration. As a matter of fact he did not
altogether escape, but the rumours of madness
perished of inanition as they neared Morwen-
stow, for no one could come into actual contact
with Hawker and fail to recognise in him that
combination of simplicity and shrewdness which
is always an unerring note of assured sanity.
The theory sometimes advanced that animals
and children attach themselves only to ' good '
people is, it must be feared, merely a pleasant
fancy; but it seems true that these instinctive,
half-developed intelligences always feel the
charm of general healthfulness of nature, and
with Hawker they were always at home. In
his relations with the creatures of fur and
feathers he reminds us of one with whom he
had probably more in common than appears
upon the surface — the gentle St Francis of

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW *97

Assisi. When we read some of the stories of
apparently miraculous instances of divine ven-
geance which Hawker was rather fond of telling
he seems a ferocious, almost blood-thirsty,
person; and it is good and pleasant to have
those mental pictures of the big, quaintly
attired man standing in the midst of the wild
birds of Morwenstow which fluttered around the
friend who loved and fed them, or walking up
the chancel on Sunday or Saint's Day, followed
by his nine cats which were duly scratched
under their chins at intervals during the service,
or sauntering along the Morwenstow lanes with
a retinue of delighted children who joyously put
their little hands in his and waited for the story
of Arthurian knight or Cornish saint which was
sure to be forthcoming.

Some one has remarked of Dante Rossetti that
he was a man of the mediaeval centuries born
out of due time ; but the description applies
much more closely to the Cornish parson than to
the Chelsea painter. He believed firmly that the
stars which led the wise men to the manger at
Bethlehem had travelled southward, to gleam
until that day when the heavens shall be wrapt
together as a scroll, in the constellation of the
Southern Cross. He loved birds for their own

J9 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

sake, but also because they reminded him of
angels — Ubi aves, ibi angeU was a saying of his —
and when he wanted rooks to settle in his grove
he knelt before the altar to pray for them, and of
course took it as the most natural thing in the
world when the rooks came. When an attempt
was made to deprive the church of Morwenstow
of the adjacent well of St John, which to
Hawker was a veritable saintly heir-loom, he
composed a solemn form of supplication which
was offered thrice a day in the sanctuary while
the case was being tried ; and when success was
won or, as Hawker would have said, given, his
pious rapture in what he regarded as the
triumph of God's Church over the hosts of the
ungodly found utterance in one of the finest of
his few but memorable sonnet utterances.

4 They dreamed not in old Hebron, when the sound
Went through the city that the promised son
Was born to Zachary, and his name was John —

They little thought that here, in this far ground
Beside the Severn Sea, that Hebrew child
Would be a cherished memory of the wild !

Here, where the pulses of the ocean bound

Whole centuries away, while one meek cell
Built by the fathers o'er a lonely well,

Still breathes the Baptist's sweet remembrance round.
A spring of silent waters with his name,
That from the angel's voice in music came,

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW *99

Here in the wilderness so faithful found

It freshens to this day the Levite's grassy mound.'

In the beginning of 1863 the wife whom
Hawker had wooed and won in such impet-
uous erratic fashion was taken from him, and
in December 1864, unable to bear the oppres-
sion of the strange loneliness, he married
Pauline, daughter of Count Kuczynski, a
Polish exile who had held an appointment in
England. Three little daughters, to whom he
gave the names of Morwenna, Rosalind, and
Juliot were now born to him, and thus, in the
Indian summer of his life the hitherto childless
child-lover knew the joys of fatherhood. As
age grew upon him, anxieties of various kinds
increased, and the long-vigorous frame began
to show signs of weakness. The New Year of
1875 found him much changed, and in June
it became evident that he must have a time
of absolute rest. He decided to visit Plymouth,
where on Monday, the Qth of August, he was
suddenly struck down by paralysis. On the
succeeding Saturday, Mrs Hawker, a devoted
Roman Catholic, suggested that Canon Mans-
field, a local ecclesiastic of her Church should
be summoned to see him. He was now speech-
less, but the expression of his countenance

200 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

was taken as acquiescent ; at ten o'clock the
fitfully conscious man was received into the
Roman Church ; and the next morning he
passed away.

It was a flat and uncharacteristic ending to
a rich and vigorous life ; but true stories are
wont to lack that climax of harmonious denoue-
ment which leaves behind it a pleasant sense
of satisfaction and fulfilment. The somewhat
heated controversy which succeeded the event
need not be revived. It was, of course, as-
serted of Hawker, as it had been of a more
illustrious convert, that while officiating as an
apparently devoted minister of the English
Church, he had been for years 'a Romanist
at heart ' ; and there was just as much external
plausibility and intrinsic falsehood in the libel
upon Robert Stephen Hawker as in that upon
John Henry Newman. To a man who went
out with special eagerness to any great venture
or forlorn hope of faith ; who was in the land
of marvel native and to the manner born ;
and to whom the universe was one great gallery
of spiritual symbolism, there may — nay, there
must — have been a fell fascination in the scho-
lastic theology, the legendary record, the elabo-
rate sacramental system of the Church whose

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 201

voice for eighteen centuries had sounded from
the seven hills of Rome ; but no one who
knew him in the flesh or who has read his
story with the apprehension of a fine sym-
pathy, will be visited by even a passing doubt
of the loyalty of the single-eyed, brave-hearted
vicar of Morwenstow.

Even now it can hardly be said that Hawker
is well known, but he is better known as a poet
than as a personality; and yet his poetry is so
informed by his personality that the former can
hardly be fully appreciated in the absence of
some knowledge of the latter. Stress must of
course be laid upon the word l fully,' for to say
that appreciation of any artistic product, be it
poem, or essay, or picture, depends wholly upon
our knowledge of its producer is to declare it
lacking of all value that is not purely biographi-
cal. There are, however, various noble works
of art — the essays of Elia, the novels of Char-
lotte Bronte, and the pictures of Jean Francois
Millet may serve as examples — the intrinsic in-
terest or charm of which is indefinitely intensi-
fied by the personal element in their conception
or handling, and to this small but particularly
fascinating class of work, Hawker's verse cer-
tainly belongs.

202 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

The most striking of its purely literary quali-
ties are simplicity and inartificiality, and it is
necessary to use both words, because of late we
have been so often asked to admire a simplicity,
which is altogether a thing of artifice, which has
no spontaniety, and which is the result of a de-
liberate striving after an effect that has struck
certain literary artists as likely to be a pleasing
novelty, in an age of complex feeling and elabor-
ated expression. Hawker had a style — that is,
he had a mode of expression which was the
natural outcome of an opulent and strongly in-
dividualised nature; but the relation between
his verse and the impassioned thought which it
utters is so vital and organic, so entirely a rela-
tion of necessity rather than of choice, that the
hateful word * stylist' can never be used con-
cerning him by any sane critic. Thus he was,
as might have been expected, especially at home
in the ballad and in the pure lyric, the two
poetical forms to the perfection of which this
spontaneous simplicity and directness are most
absolutely essential — in which self-conscious
elaboration is not merely nothing, but less
than nothing, a minus quantity. It was not
wonderful, therefore, that his ( Song of the
Western Men,' should be accepted and quoted

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 203

by such judges as Lord Macaulay and Charles
Dickens as a genuine antique, a relic of one of
those unknown country balladists whose inno-
cence of the sophistications of mere literary
culture enabled them to render their imagin-
ative vision with a force and swiftness after
which the poet in an age of more highly
organised sensibilities and aptitudes strives in
vain. The same qualities appear in all his
most characteristic poems, — in the sweet naivete
of 'Modryb Marya;' in the sombre impressive-
ness of 'The Silent Tower of Bottreau; * in the
lilting music of 'Queen Gwennivar's Round,1
with its haunting refrain,

' Naiad for Grecian waters,

Nymph for the mountain side,
But old Cornwall's bounding daughters
For grey Dundagel's tide;'

in the simple natural pathos of the dirge * Sing
from the chamber to the grave.' Of this poem
Hawker tells us that its first line ' haunted the
memory and the lips of a blameless young
farmer who died in my parish some years ago.
It was, as I conceive, a fragment of some for-
gotten dirge of which he could remember no
more. But it was his strong desire that " the
words" should be "put upon his headstone," and

2°4 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

he wished me also to write " some other words
to make it complete." I fulfilled his entreaty,
and the stranger who visits my churchyard will
find this dirge carved in stone, " in sweet
remembrance of the just," and to the praise of
the dead, Richard Cann.'

' " Sing from the chamber to the grave 1 "

Thus did the dead man say :
" A sound of melody I crave
Upon my burial day.

' " Bring forth some tuneful instrument,

And let your voices rise :
My spirit listened, as it went,
To music of the skies.

' " Sing sweetly while you travel on,

And keep the funeral slow : —

The angels sing where I am gone,

And you should sing below.

' " Sing from the threshold to the porch,

Until you hear the bell;
And sing you loudly in the church
The Psalms I love so well.

" Then bear me gently to my grave,

And as you pass along,
Remember 'twas my wish to have

A pleasant funeral song.

" So earth to earth, and dust to dust !

And though my flesh decay
My soul shall sing among the just

Until the judgment day." '

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 205

The truth is that Hawker was, within his own
range, the typical poet, described by Theseus as
of imagination all compact; and throughout his
life the simplest facts or incidents were seen
by him surrounded by a halo of transfiguring
thought and association. A curious example of
this idealising instinct is to be found in a poem
in which with his wonted fervour he does hom-
age to his diocesan, the celebrated 'Henry of
Exeter.' The poet is not in the least oppressed
by the thought of the petty wrangling and inter-
minable litigation in which that remarkable
prelate spent so large a portion of his life ; he
seizes at once upon the one poetical aspect of
the curious career • goes in imagination to the
council chamber of the peers of England ;
listens to his spiritual fathers pleading the
cause of the Church against a stiff-necked and
gainsaying generation ; and thus concludes an
apostrophe to the little church of Morwenstow
in which the Bishop has just been minister-
ing.

Fane of the woods, farewell ! a holier thought
Henceforth be thine with added beauty blest !

The presence of this day hath surely wrought
A charm immortal for thy home of rest.
Long may the swallow find her wonted nest

206 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

On thy grey walls : long may the breezes bear

The sounds of worship from thy happy breast !
The mind that shook whole Senates hath been there;
Strong be the soul of faith, and firm the voice of prayer.'

It is hardly necessary to add that though
Hawker was quick to discern the one poetic
side of a prosaic subject which a thousand men
would have missed, he was naturally drawn
towards themes, the poetical suggestiveness of
which was obvious and unmistakable. In Cor-
nish legendary lore, and especially in that
portion of it which dealt with Christian history,
or could be made subservient to a mystical
Christian use, was a poetic treasure which had
been, as it were, ' hid in a field,' waiting for
a finder who would know how to prize and
use it. Hawker had a claim to the treasure
that lay deeper than mere taste. His numer-
ous ballads and poems of various kinds, sug-
gested by local ecclesiastical and other legends,
derive much of their peculiar charm from the
implicit and child-like faith by which they
are evidently inspired. He writes, as the early
Christian painters worked, not as a mere
artist engaged in the decorative treatment of
graceful fictions, but as a believer anxious to

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 207

exhibit and celebrate the beauty of divine and
indubitable fact.

One of his poems, a fragment containing some
of his finest work, has for its title The Quest of
the Sangraal, and it is interesting to notice how
Hawker's treatment of the theme differs from
that of Lord Tennyson. The latter regards the
quest as a mystical representation of the morbid
excitement which is one of the symptoms of
spiritual decay, and accordingly the king, who
symbolises the perfect sanity of the soul cannot
but regard it with sad foreboding; while to the
former it is a real and grand culmination of
spiritual vitality, and * Arthur, the son of Uter
and the Night,' is the first to raise the cry, —

' Ho : for the Sangraal vanished vase of God.'

Even had The Quest been completed it would
certainly have possessed less of artistic finish
than the Laureate's Holy Grail, but, mere frag-
ment as it is, it is infinitely richer in that fervour
of feeling only generated by impassioned vision
of a vividly apprehended reality. And this is
a typical specimen of Hawker's work in the
field of legend. Any story which satisfied his
imagination and harmonised with his faith car-
ried its own evidence with it, and stood in no

208 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

need of the gross external proof demanded by
an age which knows more of historic criticism
than of 'the witness of the Spirit.' Matthew
Arnold, in many a musical wail has complained
that we cannot sing such songs as were sung of
old because we have lost the beliefs which pos-
sessed the older singers. Robert Stephen Hawker
certainly did not labour under this disqualifica-
tion. His was the hunger and thirst for the
unknown and illimitable which inspired Ter-
tullian's celebrated cerium quia impossibile est, —
a saying which one feels must have been as
spiritually fascinating to Hawker as it was
intellectually attractive to Sir Thomas Browne.
In the border region — the region in which
the things of sense still remain, but are seen
through a luminous mist of spiritual symbol-
ism and association — Hawker was peculiarly
at home. He never went on a deliberate search
after hidden meanings or morals as do the
mechanically-minded mystics, to whom every
object in nature and in religious art is an
arbitrary hieroglyph, with no fluidity of sig-
nificance or multiplicity of suggestion. His
mind worked instinctively ; he felt before he
saw ; and indicated with the indescribable truth

of emotion rather than with the outlined pre-

i

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 209

cision of thought, the unseen spiritual vesture
with which things seen are clothed, and by
which they are glorified. There is no more
characteristic illustration of this special sensi-
bility and activity than the sonnet entitled
'The Vine,' the theme of which was supplied
by what was to him a never-failing source of
suggestion, the church of his forty years'
ministry.

* Hearken : There is in old Morwenna's shrine,
A lonely sanctuary of the Saxon days,
Reared by the Severn sea for prayer and praise,
Amid the carved work of the roof, a vine.
Its root is where the eastern sunbeams fall
First in the chancel, then along the wall
Slowly it travels on, a leafy line,
With here and there a cluster, and anon
More and more grapes, until the growth hath gone
Through arch and aisle. Hearken : and heed the sign.
See at the altar side the steadfast root :
Mark well the branches, count the summer fruit :
So let a meek and faithful heart be thine,
And gather from that tree a parable divine.'

The kind of work represented here must be
enjoyed for its beauty, tenderness, and spiritual
fervour ; but it is often somewhat lacking in
healthy virility, and it is therefore specially
needful to emphasise the statement that Hawker
was an essentially manly poet. His sympathy

o

210 HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW

with the ascetic life, and a cloistral tendency of
imagination which, if not inborn, became at an
early age habitual, never dulled the quickness
of his feeling for the simpler human emotions
to which, in so many of his poems he has
given beautiful and adequate expression, without
ever laying himself open to the charge often,
and not always unjustly, brought against Words-
worth of having suffered the prosaic accidents
of his subjects to overpower — so far, at least, as
immediate impression was concerned — their
really poetic essentials. Nor did his mystical
pre-possessions ever blunt his enjoyment of the
merely sensuous side of Nature; and the plea-
sure he derived from the sonorous break of a
mighty wave upon an opposing cliff, the strong
flight of a solitary sea-fowl, or the rustling of a
mountain stream through a narrow valley to
the sea, had as much of the flesh and blood
quality which belongs to the enjoyment of the
typical sportsman, as of the more contemplative
delight which is the possession of a poet with
an eye for the things * behind this show.'

It is, indeed, not unfitting that the force
which inevitably belongs to any last word
should be given to the expression of a convic-
tion that half, or more than half, of the charm

HAWKER OF MORWENSTOW 21 1

of Hawker's verse is to be found in its rich
humanity. It is verse through which warm
blood circulates, in which a strong pulse beats
— verse which moves us as we are moved by a
human voice of tenderness in time of sorrow, by
the ringing accent of courage jin time of fear.
There have been finer lyrics than 'Queen
Gwennivar's Round/ finer sonnets than ' Pater
vester pascit ilia/ finer ballads — though not
many of them — than 'The Silent Tower of
Bottreau ' ; but there are few poems of any
rank which find a way home to us more im-
mediately than they.

THE END

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